Fungi Friday's - January 28th, 2021

Issue #21

Hey there Fungi Friday fam! Welcome back for yet another edition. This week we get away from psilocybin coverage and focus on how our little fungi friends can benefit our health in all sorts of ways. Also, it’s already the end of January, meaning we are basically 1/12 done with 2022. Crazy how fast time flies.. Let’s dive in!

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Chewing gum made from mushroom extract can protect against Covid-19, scientists say. 

The first article of the week features a new study claiming to have shown that chitosan – a type of sugar derived from shellfish and mushrooms – has shown some potential promise in the possibility that it might be able to interfere with the virus’s ability to latch on to healthy cells and cause infection. This study claims that after 30 minutes’ chewing, Covid-fighting chitosan enters and stays abundant in saliva, fighting off the virus.

And following this study, we now have scientists in Germany working on creating a new product named GoBeDo Immune Boosting Peppermint Gum, which they claim may prevent infection. Unfortunately there wasn’t a whole lot more in terms of detail behind the study, nor the product, but you can certainly bet it’s something we will be monitoring here at Fungi Fridays.

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Is This New Mushroom Bacon the Most Sustainable Plant-Based Protein?

For the second feature of the week, who doesn’t love bacon? So when a crossover between bacon and our very own fungi, you know I couldn’t pass this article up.

The article covers AtLast Foods, a company that is developing one of the most delicious and sustainable plant-based bacon on the market. Currently capable of making 3 million pounds of mushroom bacon on just one acre of land, they are currently in the midst of plans to significantly expand their production and distribution capabilities.

By partnering with Whitecrest Mushrooms, AtLast will be able to scale up its production for its MyBacon products. The mycelium-based mushroom bacon is designed to cook, taste, and feel like traditional bacon without any animal products. AtLast will use the mushrooms grown at the Whitecrest farm located in Ontario, Canada in its proprietary AirMycleium technology. The technology produces whole-cut vegan bacon, minimizing environmental costs when compared to traditional bacon production.

“After more than a decade of experience growing and producing the highest quality gourmet mushrooms, we’re excited to leverage our expertise in the new market of alternative proteins,”

Together, the two companies will facilitate one of the most expansive and sustainable plant-based bacon businesses to date. They plan to build a farm where the mushrooms will be grown, made into plant-based bacon slabs, and brined to give customers the full experience of bacon.

MyBacon will feature a clean, GMO-free recipe that only contains six ingredients including mushroom mycelium, refined coconut oil, cane sugar, flaked salt, smokey flavoring, and beet juice. The company claims that the product will provide the same chew and sear as regular bacon, making the cooking process nearly indistinguishable from animal-derived bacon.

“AtLast began as a question on how to disrupt factory farming and help alleviate the climate crisis, and we found the solution waiting for us in nature,” Co-founder and CEO of Ecovative and AtLast Eben Bayer said in a statement. “By growing mycelium, we produce food in a climate-conscious way that doesn’t compromise on taste. Now more than ever, Spaceship Earth needs more plant-based food options. Partnering with Whitecrest Mushrooms allows us to meet those growing needs.”

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Protein alternatives to meat with a greater contribution of fiber and a total absence of cholesterol.

And for the final feature of the week, a quick overview on the many benefits of mushrooms and how they’ve been utilized through history and today, as well as how they may become beneficial in the future.

The needs of the future

Today, fungi are more important than ever. Our future requires an urgent ecological transition, a priority objective of the European Union to achieve climate neutrality in 2050. To achieve this, there are important initiatives underway to recover the planet's biodiversity; to transform the current food model into a sustainable system, and to promote the circular economy. Fungi play a crucial role if we want these objectives to be met.

In search of new drugs

In any forest around us, in autumn or spring, they can be seen on the ground, or growing on tree trunks , various types of mushrooms that reflect an enormous network of invisible filaments.

The great variety of forest ecosystems with their diversity of interactions with plants, animals, bacteria and other fungi allows us to suppose that the basidiomycetes of these ecosystems, which appear as a hinge between the plant and animal kingdoms, must produce an unexplored variety of enzymes and secondary metabolites that can enrich the arsenal of drugs and industrial products that we currently have.

Sequestering carbon like fungi

Fungi are, along with animals and plants, the third group of macroscopic organisms of our world. Whereas plants feed through photosynthesis, mushrooms decompose matter in their environment to feed. This system for obtaining food makes fungi the main decomposers of plant biomass, and makes them essential in the carbon cycle in forest environments.

Fungi have played a fundamental role in the geological accumulation of carbon deposits in the form of fossil fuels.

Biofuels as a future

The oyster mushroom P. ostreatus is a white rot fungus that degrades wood lignin. By degrading it, it leaves the cellulose open to attack by other microorganisms and enzymes.

These enzymes make the enormous amount of carbon stored in lignocellulose available to the fermentative processes: the main deposit of carbon on Earth. This process is of great interest to the biological treatment of plant residues and forest that will allow obtaining second-generation biofuels.

New foods and new clothes 

To finish, let's look at the future of food and clothing. Mushrooms can produce new proteins that complement or replace those of animal origin in the form of supplements or as a base to produce alternatives to meat with a greater contribution of fiber and a total absence of cholesterol .

But perhaps a spectacular recent advance has been the use of fungi to produce alternatives to leather in the manufacture of not only accessories (bags high-end, sneakers) but also fashion lines such as the one recently presented by Stella McCartney in Paris based on the use of vegan mushroom leather .

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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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