🍄 Unveiling Real Mushrooms, Functional Brews, and Global Fungi Adventures!🍄

Here's an original mushroom joke to kick off today's newsletter:

What did the mushroom say to the mycelium?

You're beneath me!

A bit of what is in today’s edition:

🍄 Highlight the importance of real mushrooms over mycelium on grain products, using a humorous analogy to engage readers. 

🍄 Introduce the collaboration between Mycopreneur and Real Mushrooms, emphasizing a commitment to quality and authenticity.

🍄 Standardized testing in the emerging psilocybin market.

🍄 Insight into Chinese Mushroom Industry.

Real Mushrooms over Mycelium over Grain Products

(Can you spot the mushroom in the image above?)

No, but seriously, this joke works because it's a true statement that also carries over to the multibillion-dollar functional mushroom market:

You see, there are a bunch of jokers out there selling you mycelium on grain in place of actual mushrooms in their products.

For reference, imagine you've bought an apple pie, and when you dive in, you notice that the company you've purchased your pie from has included leaves, dirt, and twigs from the apple tree in your pie. This is certainly not what you were after, and when you raise the issue with the company, they answer that "roots, twigs, and leaves are all part of the apple."

As mushrooms continue to trend upwards and experience unprecedented demand in North America and elsewhere, make sure to educate your family and friends about the benefits of real mushrooms. Friends don't let friends buy overpriced and underwhelming mycelium on grain products. 

Speaking of Real Mushrooms, I'm delighted to announce a collaborative partnership between Mycopreneur and Real Mushrooms - the gold standard in functional mushroom companies.

Real Mushrooms came into existence after many lengthy conversations between Founder Skye Chilton and his father Jeff, who established Nammex - the leading supplier of organic mushroom extract ingredients to supplement companies - in 1989. 

The infiltration of the 'medicinal mushroom product' category by numerous companies selling mycelium on grain under the guise of 'mushrooms' led to an opportunity to set the record straight by producing top quality mushroom supplements that use...real mushrooms. 

Learn more about their story here and check out the product line for yourself. 

But that's not all folks!

I'm equally elated to welcome Everyday Dose mushroom coffee to the Mycopreneur family.

Everyday Dose is absolutely killing it, and it's an honor to collaborate with such a reputable and quality-obsessed company in the functional mushroom space.

I typically mix in my Everyday Dose mushroom coffee into my regularly scheduled coffee intake, enabling me to continue enjoying the traditional espressos and 'cowboy coffee' (dark and thick) that I learned to love back in 2014 when working at a greenshell mussel factory on the south island of New Zealand while working my way across the country on a 'Working Holiday' visa. 

If you're anything like me, three coffees a day is simply too much to handle - but one regular coffee and two mushroom coffees works verrryyyyyy well.

Load yourself up with a month’s supply of Everyday Dose mushroom coffee and tag both of our accounts on your socials if you decide to give them a try.

Mushrooms International: Entheogenic Explorations & Chinese Medicinals

Mushroom madness in Papua New Guinea? 

You may have heard of the infamous Gordon Wasson - the first Westerner to 'discover' (ahem, document and share without permission) the psilocybin mushroom ritual of the Mazatec indigenous people deep in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, in the early 1950s. 

Wasson shared his findings with the world - again, without permission - and it kicked off a widespread societal interest in psilocybin mushrooms across the U.S. and beyond that continues today. 

But have you heard about any of Wasson's other trips to research entheogenic mushrooms?

Though primarily identified with his activities in Oaxaca, Wasson actually circumnavigated the globe several times over in search of other ancient and undisturbed mushroom rituals ongoing in remote pockets of the planet. 

One such place he visited and researched native entheogenic mushroom use was in Papua New Guinea, a nation that continues today to be one of the most undeveloped and largely unvisited regions on Earth.

From an account of Wasson's travels in "PNG":

Ethnomycological information became available to a wider audience beyond the mycological community when Wasson published an article in a popular magazine describing the use of hallucinogenic Psilocybe species for religious purposes in Mexico. It was, therefore, inevitable that the early reports about a so-called “mushroom madness” in Papua New Guinea (Reay 1959, 1960) would attract ethnomycologists to explore the phenomenon in more detail.

Mushroom madness in New Guinea describes a behavior in which the affected men, apparently under the influence of previously consumed mushrooms, run amok and continuously terrorize, chase, and attack members of their own clan or neighboring clans with spears or other weapons (Reay, 1959, 1960).

Their irrational behavior may last for several hours or even up to two days. Other effects are shivering, double vision, and intermittent aphasia. The behavior of the affected women differs strongly: they ask their husbands to decorate them, seize their husbands’ weapons, and start dancing, an activity that is normally forbidden- den to married women, giggle, flirt with several men, and boast about all sorts of sexual adventures they allegedly had (Reay, 1959, 1960).

Both the anthropologist (Reay, 1965) and the mycologists involved (Heim & Wasson, 1965) soon expressed their doubts about the causality of the mushroom madness as being merely a result of the ingestion of mushrooms. They assumed, especially in their later publications, that a great deal of the mushroom madness is more often a theatrical play than actual effects caused by the consumption of certain mushrooms (Clarke, 1965; Reay, 1977).

The ritualization of the mushroom madness and the question of how many generations ago it had developed remain the subject of anthropological considerations that are beyond the scope of this paper."

Fascinating stuff that I haven't really seen anyone get to the bottom of yet.

However, this account contrasts the field research cited in the paper linked above, stating that 'mushroom madness' in Papua New Guinea was perhaps actually caused by the ingestion of toxic amounts of nicotine.

A Peek into a Chinese Mushroom Operation

I recently stumbled upon a Chinese mushroom company called Qihe Biotech.

China has over 4,000 years of medicinal mushroom use in their culture, meaning they're currently a few millennia ahead of us here in the USA regarding the matter. 

China grows almost 90% of mushrooms worldwide. 

There are entire villages in China that specialize in cultivating one type of mushroom or another, and it's been reported that seasonal markets in Hunan province can feature up to 800 different varieties of edible and medicinal mushrooms. 

A number of North American companies source their mushrooms from Chinese cultivators - the scale at which they're able to produce and the cost per pound - not to mention the quality, if you know where to look - mean that China is light years ahead of mushroom cultivators based in North America and Europe when it comes to doing scale. 

As with everything else in the mushroom supplement market, there's plenty of snake oil coming out of the 'The Red Dragon' country - so unless you personally go over there on multiple occasions and establish a trustworthy connection decades in the making, it's probably best to source your mushrooms and extracts from someone who has already done decades of work in this regard.

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That's all for today. folks

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🍄 🌮 Happy Shiitako Tuesday! 🌮 🍄