On Food and Cooking

benefit: the mushrooms gather soil minerals
and share them with the tree roots, which in
turn share the tree’s sugars with the
mushrooms. Some fungi are parasites on
living plants and cause disease; we eat the
plant parasite that infects corncobs (corn
smut, or huitlacoche). And some, including
the world’s most popular mushrooms, live off
the decaying remains of dead plants. White
and brown mushrooms apparently evolved
along with plant-eating mammals to take
advantage of the animals’ partly digested but
nutrient-rich dung! They now thrive in
artificial piles of compost and manure.
Mushrooms that live on decaying plants
have been relatively easy to cultivate. The
Chinese were raising shiitake mushrooms on
oak logs in the 13th century. The cultivation
of the common white mushroom began in
17th-century France and boomed during the
Napoleonic era in quarry tunnels near Paris.
Today, Agaricus bisporus (or A. brunnescens)