21st Century Guidebook to Fungi

Fungal biomass is a high-quality food source because it contains a good content of protein (typically 20% to 30% crude protein as a percentage of dry matter), which contains all of the amino acids that are essential to human and animal nutrition. Add characteristically low fat content, a chitinous wall as a source of dietary fibre, useful vitamin content, especially of B vitamins, and carbohydrate in the form of glycogen, and fungal biomass can be considered an ideal food. Judging from archaeological and similar finds, mushrooms, toadstools and bracket fungi have been used by humans since before recorded history for both food and medicinal purposes.

We currently depend on fungi and fungal products every hour of every day and this chapter will concentrate on the human fungal foodstuffs in current use (Moore, 2001). However, before turning to this aspect we want to deal with the ways that other animals exploit fungi for food. Fungi feature prominently in food webs, and wild fungi are picked commercially, too. But it's not solely a matter of ‘picking mushrooms’; fungal cells and mycelium are used as human food, and fungi are used to prepare many commonly used fermented foods, so there is a need to consider several different industrial cultivation methods. Finally, to make the point that we are not the only animals that cultivate fungi, we will discuss the relationship between gardening insects and their fungi, though we will describe these mutualisms in detail in Chapter 15.