My Mushroom Manifesto

2019 update. It’s a few years since I originally published this article and despite my continued disagreements with the Forestry Commission in Hampshire, I have tried to develop a reasonable working relationship with them, and to be fair, they have too. Year on year the problem is always the same…all sides of the debate having to wrestle with unpleasant and ever changing policies, enforced by people who individually are all very nice and I’m not sure have that much faith in the party line they are asked to toe. Alas each year there are further amendments to the ‘permissions’ that the FC issue, each one chipping away at our civil liberties, attempting to circumnavigate bits of English law. This year I notice the paperwork forbids anyone who attends one of my fungi forays being allowed to take any mushrooms away with them. We can pick them but then we must discard them…what nonsense is this! For obvious reasons I will be ignoring this and returned my paperwork with this line and a few others crossed through. I can’t say I honestly feel that I need to apply for any sort of permission but I do so to be polite and to avoid clashes with other events. Some of the points below may be delivered in a rather ‘ranty’ tone of voice which if not now, certainly fitted the way I was feeling at the time.

2012ish.

Each year I publish my Autumn mushroom hunting dates and each year I seem to get quite a bit of flack, almost always uninformed or misguided, sometimes slightly abusive. Mushroom hunting seems to be one of those topics that everyone, regardless of how little they know about it, has an opinion about. So, this year I would prefer not to engage in the same seven or eight predictable debates about whether hunting for wild mushrooms is or isn’t a good thing to do. I hope you will find the answers, if not, at least my opinions, below.

1. The majority of the mushroom forays I run are on private property, where I have the permission and approval of the land owner, to pick mushrooms and take other people to do so and to charge them for doing this activity with me. It’s private property and if we wanted to hold a festival for 30000 people and all dance naked through the woods, it would be nobody’s business but our own. The Forestry Commission in Hampshire has, for years set a limit of 1.5kg per person per visit (a guideline, not an enforceable law…please see point 11 below for recent changes and developments), for personal consumption but when I take out a group, not only are we on private land so not subject to this restriction, we pick only a fraction of this amount….an average walk with 12 people culminates in a total haul of about 3kg, everyone gets a little bag to take home but the main focus is on learning about the mushrooms and the woodland they support, not on picking. When we do visit other areas, predominantly pine plantations, managed woodland and heathland, certainly not the delicate and ancient eco-systems that so often get mentioned in the press, this is with the full agreement of The Forestry Commission, who despite us having had some differences of opinions, I always try to work with.

2. I am not a commercial forager and I never have been, although I have no qualms those who are, providing they do so in a sustainable manner. My activities and the events I run are never focused on collecting anything in much quantity, I do, however, charge people to come on wild food walks with me, during which I teach them to understand and respect the environment, equip them with some basic knowledge and point out some of the dangers, pitfalls etc.

3. Mushroom (or more specifically the mycelium that creates them) are perennial organisms and reproduce almost entirely underground. Spreading spores is a way of colonising new areas and is more an insurance policy than anything else. Suggestions that picking the fruiting bodies (that means the mushrooms) will effect future growth is incorrect and unfounded. The primary danger to the future of our fungi and as such, the trees and other organisms they support, is from loss of habitat, curtailing the mushroom mycelium’s ability to spread, not from people picking them. The Uk is the most deforested country in Europe, less than 12% woodland compared to average levels of 20-30% in most other countries. Further more, we have just 2% of our old growth forests remaining. If, as I do, you really care about this, join The Woodland Trust and other campaign groups. Airports, roads, supermarkets, housing expansion, FRACKING….these are the threats to our wildlife, not people picking wild mushrooms.

4. If you are getting your opinions from Wikipedia, The Daily Mail and other newspapers, I suggest you do some more reliable research. Each year, all the papers churn out some very lazy desk top journalism, and always regurgitate the same four or five points from the previous years…these are often wildly inaccurate. Common themes include warnings about mass poisonings, an incorrectly labelled photo of a Death Cap mushroom, racists stories about gangs of “Eastern European” foragers, something about Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, the tragic story of Nicholas Evans (author of The Horse Whisperer) who fed his family with deadly poisonous Web Cap mushrooms. Ridiculous claims are made by amateur mycologists, especially one lady that the press seem to annually default to out of laziness or habit, who’s wild, sensationalist and utterly inaccurate comments, regularly make it into the national press. Often I see the word “Stripping” as in “The forest is being stripped of all it’s fungi”, used to describe the activities of any and all mushroom pickers. Let’s be specific; the definition of the word Strip is “to remove ALL coverings from”. The combined effect of everyone picking mushrooms in The New Forest is the equivalent of an erotic dancer removing just one of her earrings; she would hardly be able to call herself a stripper. These articles are basically just space fillers and often feature incorrect photos and lots of badly researched information. Do not trust them.
December 2018 : An additional note. this year I have noticed some far more balanced articles, especially in the Times and The Spectator, but still plenty more that are just nonsense and the media always looking to report on a conflict where there isn’t one.

5. With regard to the idea that over picking will harm the future growth of fungi, deprive other creatures of a food source or damage the environment, I think it’s best to look at the case of the Chanterelle mushroom, the single most consumed wild mushroom world wide. Each year literally tens of thousands of tons ( can you picture that) of this mushroom, are picked and eaten, they are all wild, it cannot be cultivated. The best and really the only complete survey on how mass picking effects fungi, has been carried out across the last 15-20 years, looking specifically at the Chanterelle. And how is it doing as a result of this furious assault on it’s fruit? Well actually it’s thriving and numbers are actually slightly up, not down. Here’s the survey…
https://www.wsl.ch/info/mitarbeitende/egli/egli_2006c

6. Think of mushrooms as the fruit of a huge underground tree, sometimes they have good years and sometimes bad but we would not suggest that Oak trees were scarce if one year they didn’t produce any acorns. Various fungi, in my experience, seem to fruit prolifically in roughly seven year cycles but these are subject to the whims of the weather, temperature etc and often a healthy mushroom mycelium will hunker down for many years, concentrate on spreading under the ground and fruit only when the time is right. No mushrooms does not mean the organism that creates them is not alive and well.

7. Effects on other animals and damage to woodland. I have to return again to my point about loss of habitat being the real problem but also add that 99.9 % of the fungi I come across, no one else will ever see. They are hidden away in the woods, in rural areas or just hiding in plain site in your local park, the point being, there is more, far more, than enough to support the creatures that rely on fungi as a food source, a breeding ground or a home. For every exaggerated report of people picking all the mushrooms in an area, there are ten thousand patches that no one ever finds. Each year, I find massive swathes of wild fungi, literally millions of fruit bodies, that go totally undisturbed, many hidden deep in the woods but often huge patches of gourmet mushrooms, completely visible, near roads and woodland edges, that get left to their own devices.

8. Enough racism please! Eastern Europeans, dawn raids, organised gangs, walkie talkies, blanket picking and that guy in the car park sorting them out..please, enough….We see an Englishman with a basket of blackberries and congratulations are in order, we see a Latvian family with a few carrier bags of mushrooms and suddenly there’s talk of foreigners raping our forests. I am not saying that commercial mushroom picking is an urban myth, far from it, but the press are constantly reprinting the same article featuring most of the shock headlines above. I spend a lot of time in the woods in the autumn, far more than most people and hand on heart, I have never seen one of these organised gangs, but I have met three or four families out picking mushrooms together, a perfectly normal pastime in most of Europe but not in the fungiphobic UK. It’s just not part of our cultural heritage, but how quick we are to raise arms the second anyone else takes an interest. Has anyone, who doesn’t work at the Daily Mail, actually witnessed these gangs at work, not the apparent aftermath, but actually seen a big group of guys with radios and knives sweeping the woodland? I have seen a group of Italian chefs from London, out on a Cep picking mission but I’m sure that’s just fine with the national press, Middle England and the happy customers tucking into a Porcini risotto at Jamie’s Italian.

9. Other comments I have had thrown at me in the past relate to damage to the woodlands, insect life and to rare plants. I have to refer back to my points above about loss of habitat being the real problem, but also to mention that most of the events I run take place in areas that are not old growth forest but predominantly pine plantations, often supporting very little other plant life; the damage, or lack of it, caused by a group of people out to look at and pick the odd wild mushroom, is imperceptible, compared to numerous other recreational and non recreational uses of the forest. What’s more, in such screen obsessed times, I make utterly no apology for encouraging people to get out of the city, off their arses and out in the woods.  I’ve also had political theories waved at me, everything from the history of land ownership in England to “The Tragedy of the Commons” neither of which in anyway apply to mushroom hunting, as far as I can see. Before taking the moral high ground and/or developing opinions with little to no research behind them, I’d ask you seriously to ask yourself, what exactly it is you are doing personally, to help or protect the environment and most importantly, before suggesting that others going mushroom hunting might cause damage to our natural world, to consider the impact, damage, loss of habitat and other factors connected with every single piece of food you eat, whether from your local shop, the supermarket or that Costa coffee cup in your hand right now. I truly love our native woodland and as anyone who has joined me in the last few years will tell you, I teach people to respect and enjoy it, never to abuse it.

10. Since writing this last year, a few extra points have sprung to mind, one which specifically applies to The New Forest and I have discussed it in detail with the respected mycologists like Clifford Davy. For centuries, the right of Panage has allowed people to graze their pigs on the forest every autumn, to take advantage of the fallen acorns, a great source of food for them. Although numbers are less than a thousand now, as recently as the 19th century, between 6-7000 pigs were released onto the forest and this, unlike the activities of foragers, does have a damaging effect on the mycelium due to the disruption caused to the top layer of soil…add to this the cattle and ponies that graze on the forest all year round and you have thousands of animals roaming and digging up the woods. And, the effect of all this activity across the centuries? Nothing at all, the mycelium gets damaged and over time, repairs itself, carries on with it’s business as it always has. Another point to consider is the largely unchecked growth of highly invasive Rhododendron species, responsible for smothering some huge swathes of fragile woodland. I also consider The Forestry Commission’s policy of spraying Glyphosate (Round Up) in some areas of The New Forest, to be deeply questionable and often, if not always, unnecessary. Furthermore, the damaged caused by agricultural chemicals; the majority of scientific data puts the blame for any decline in fungi since the 1980’s squarely on increased soil nitrogen and emissions, a direct effect of huge scale fertiliser use (Refs: Arnolds, 2010; Dahlberg, 2010). Lastly, I have to wonder why our fungi are apparently so precious and so fragile, compared to those of other European countries, Poland for example, where this whole debate is considered ridiculous and  where annually, mushrooms are picked on mass and have been for hundreds of years, possibly thousands, without ever effecting future harvests or the environments in which they grow.

11. 2016 saw the introduction of what The Forestry Commission referred to as a full ‘ban’ on mushroom picking in The New Forest, attempting to remove the ancient rite of people to forage for wild mushrooms for their personal consumption. This was not well received, fuelled accusations of institutional racism and they have had to do something of a U-turn after admitting that their ‘ban’ had no basis in law and was utterly unenforceable. They now su it was advisory, a request for people to look but not pick, despite putting up huge red banners in all New Forest car parks with a picture of a mushroom in a red circle with a line through it and the words NO PICKING! My thoughts on the years events (copied below) are summarised in a post I added to an excellent article by mycologist Peter Marren. He argued that entrusting the FC with the care of what was left of our ancient woodland was akin to leaving your kids with King Herod…here’s a link to the whole thread and below, my contribution. Despite all this I am trying to maintain a relationship with the FC and hope, perhaps naively, that they are moving their rather intrenched position a little.
https://markavery.info/2016/09/07/guest-blog-big-brother-fc-peter-marren

Unenforceable – (the removal of fungi for personal consumption falls between 3 laws, none of which make it prosecutable) – Unsupported (there is not a thread of documented scientific evidence to support the suggestion that picking fungi, regardless of the quantity picked, has any detrimental effect on future populations)- Unfair (to punish individuals enjoying the forest in a way they have done for hundreds if not thousands of years in order to discourage these mythical gangs of commercial foragers) – Unsubstantiated – (see above, where is this evidence of “mass stripping”, it does not exist, what the FC have recorded in the last 2 years does not back this up one iota..ask to see their repoerts) – Untrue (the “ban” has nothing to do with ecology and everything to do with politics, pressure from local lobbyists and an ongoing media campaign that has, very successfully, reported the same untruths year in year out) – Unclear (is it a ban, a call for licensing, a request or a threat?) – Unheard of ( the rest of Europe thinks we are a joke, they harvest their fungi on mass annually and enjoy the experience, safe in the time proven knowledge that they will be able to do the same the following year) Underhand – (the FC were in discussion with foragers about these issues and had promised to look into various approaches, but never discussed that behind closed doors, they were still singing the same old song and pushing ahead with this policy regardless) – Unpleasant (the constant references to gangs, eastern europeans, theft and profiteering, maybe not exactly by the FC but they have constantly allowed the national press to report things in this disgusting way without contradiction… and the FC have made utterly no effort whatsoever to engage with the large Polish community in Southampton, have never printed any literature or put up a poster in polish…if their are cultural differences, and believe me there are (mushroom collecting is a very normal past time in Poland), they should be met with conversation and outreach, not harsh words and harsher measures) – Unbalanced – (even if the activities of foragers were to threaten the local existence of a couple of species of grubs and insects, are they keystone species, vital to the balance of this supposedly fragile eco-system, no they are not, but that aside why are they so at risk from one tiny cross section of people who use the forest not all the rest, the dog walkers who make 500 metres around every new forest car park into a repulsive animal toilet, the mountain bikers who surely contribute more to compaction (what the FC like to label trampling) than any forager could ever do, the masses of tourists, the traffic, the ponies, the 7-800 pigs let out annually onto the forest and most notably the FC themselves who have destroyed vast areas or our beautiful woodland and replaced them with christmas trees and continue to us Glyphosate in the forest despite every other country in Europe having banned it). Unbelievable!