Fungi Friday's - August 12th, 2022
Issue #43
Happy Friday, fungi Friday fam — We’re back with the 43rd edition of your favorite mushroom publication on the web!
Approaching two weeks from the kickoff of attempt number two, so we’ll be making a trip down to the farm this weekend to check on progress. Depending on how the mycelium growth is looking, there’s a chance we may move them into fruiting (which is where progress stalled last time), however if the takeover isn’t fully there yet, we may give them another week. In either case, plan is to plant another set of spawn next weekend finishing out spawn container number two and putting us approximately two weeks out from hopefully having our first successful fruit.
And with that, i’ll wrap up the updates for this week and get on to the stories!
This new vertical farm is growing towering racks of mycelium for fungi-based bacon
Article number one of the week features MyForest Foods’s 78,000-square-foot vertical farm, which can grow three million pounds a year of mycelium, the root-like structure of mushrooms, to become alt-bacon.
If all living organisms on Earth evolved from a single cell 3.5 billion years ago, it stands to reason that they’re a lot alike. And, scientists have noted that fungi are characteristically even closer to animals than plants—which helps Eben Bayer, cofounder and CEO of MyForest Foods, argue that fungi are the better meat substitute. “Mycelium is basically an inside-out animal,” he says. “Mushrooms are quite fleshy, so they really have a lot of the characteristics that you find in an animal, unlike plants.”
MyForest Foods is turning mycelium, the root-like network of a mushroom that absorb nutrients from the soil, into a plant-based—well, fungus-based—meat. The mycelium tech company will grow slabs of the mushroom material in its new 78,000-square-foot vertical farm in upstate New York—the world’s largest for mycelium, according to the company—where, for optimal growth, it keeps conditions precisely like a misty morning forest. Overall seems to be a pretty innovative concept, something we will certainly keep on our radar (and maybe even try out soon — cuz as a bacon lover and a fungi lover, why not?)
Fungus 'more efficient' than pesticides
Feature number two of the week dives into a new study claiming that a genus of fungi has been found to have better control of soil pathogens than conventional pesticides, and can also help breed vegetable seedlings. This research out of China has shown that with only a single dose of the fungi genus, the flower number and production of vegetable seedlings can be enhanced and the harvest stage can be prolonged for one to two months. It even goes on to claim that the survival rate can even be increased to at least 95 percent from some 60-70 percent.
This Startup Wants to Use Magic Mushrooms to End Alcoholism
For our final article of the week, a deep dive into alcohol use disorder—more colloquially known as alcoholism—and how mushrooms may be able to help.
While many adults these days tend to enjoy a few drinks in social setting, for some, this practice often times becomes as habitual as a cup of coffee might be and very quickly, can become incredibly debilitating as you find yourself living a life at the beck and call of addiction, sacrificing your relationships, career, and well-being for another drink to take the edge off.
That’s the reality for roughly 107 million people across the world who suffer from alcohol use disorder. While there are many reasons for the addiction, a lot of cases can be pinned on some combination of a genetic predisposition to addiction, and mental-health issues such as trauma or depression. Alcohol can become a means to cope with stress, depression, and anxiety. And while there are plenty of places out there to help with this prevalent addiction, most either have infamously low success rates or some nasty side effects.
But, there’s an alternative solution that’s ready to burst onto the market that might raise some eyebrows: psychedelic drugs. While the idea of treating one substance addiction with an illicit substance might seem strange, it’s actually been researched and practiced for decades. One such experiment is from Clairvoyant Therapeutics, a Vancouver-based biotech company that’s looking into developing the first commercially available psilocybin treatment for alcoholism. The article is pretty long and goes into the details, in addition to documenting the specifics, of the studies that are currently going on related to this subject. All in all, while there is most certainly more research needed, the hope is that this substance paired with professional led psychotherapy may be a viable solution to be utilized to help those struggling with this addiction in the future.
Want even more? Here are some other interesting, mushroom focused reads of the week:
Psilocybin Microdosing Shows No Benefit to Creativity, Cognition, Perception in New Scientific Study
Inside the lab that's creating enough psilocybin for everyone on Earth
As always, thank you for reading this weeks edition of Fungi Friday’s! If you enjoyed what you found, please feel free to forward to friends also interested in the Fungi Community!
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