Happy New Year all!
As an optimistic economist, I am often challenged when I say that there will always be new jobs, new businesses and new sectors in the economy. It amazes me that anyone doubts this, but they do. So, here’s a new sector that is already sprouting new jobs and new businesses: mushrooms. Before you burst out laughing, note that according to Transparency Market Research, the global mushroom market is now $34.1b and will be $69.3b by 2024.
Packaging: Consumers and commercial firms are increasingly focused on sustainability and environmental impact. People are turning to biodegradable packaging. That means mushrooms. A firm called Mushroom Packaging creates the most elegant mushroom-colored spongy packaging materials. The packaging is “grown in 7 days”. Their site says, “A high-performing packaging solution, cost-competitive, thermally insulating, and water-resistant. Add to the soil to compost in 45 days. Certified 100% Biobased and Cradle to Cradle Gold.” People have begun to comprehend the dangers of plastic, especially microplastics and microplastic fibers from synthetic clothing, all of which which are deeply endangering humans and animal life. The Macarthur Foundation says there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050 on the current trajectory. Packaging is increasingly being made from other plants like kelp and seaweed too. But, mushrooms are quickly becoming a core component that can be mixed with other biodegradable substances like hemp and sawdust. Mushrooms grow incredibly fast and can be pressed into almost any shape. They feed on absolutely everything. The feeding and care of mushrooms is pretty easy. So expect the packaging industry to be revolutionaized by mushrooms.
Handbags and consumer goods: Hermes has launched a handbag made of mushrooms in collaboration with MycoWorks. The Victoria Bag is made of “fine mycelium” and is the first luxury object to be made of this new material. It seems to tan just like leather. Sounds like soon we’ll be wearing mushrooms instead of leather. Adidas just launched it’s first mushroom leather shoe in April 2021. Adidas says, the Stan Smith Mylo “marks our pinnacle exploration into creating footwear products that are truly Made with Nature, contributing to our commitment to the Regenerative Loop creation process, where products are made with nature.”
Space and Radiation: It turns out that mushrooms can clean up and protect against radiation. Just five years after the horrific explosion of a nuclear core at Chernobyl, noble mushrooms had sprung to life inside the reactor. They were eating and eliminating the radiation! One particular strain, Cryptococcus neoformans, was found to have an exceptionally high level of melanin. Samples were sent to The International Space Station in 2019 to help protect astronauts in space from radiation. At $400 a gram, it has to be the most expensive but most effective sun cream in the solar system.
Foraging: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing won a myriad of prizes for her wonderful book: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Winner of the 2016 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology
Winner of the 2016 Gregory Bateson Prize, The Society for Cultural Anthropology
One of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2015 in Business and Economics
One of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2015 in Science
One of Flavorwire’s 10 Best Books by Academic Publishers in 2015
One of Times Higher Education’s Best Books of 2015
She describes displaced immigrants from Japan in WWII and from Laos and Vietnam during the 1960s who arrived in the US with no language or business skills. But they had one rare and incredibly lucrative skill. They knew how to forage for the most valuable mushrooms, particularly the Matsuke mushroom. She describes a way of living we have almost forgotten, foraging. The financial crisis and COVID brought foraging back. People started to venture out into the woods and across city parks looking for food. Necessity drove many towards mushrooms, a free source of protein. For others, foraging was a return to nature and a way to commune with it in a nourishing way. Foraging started a comeback in the UK 2018 when “wild food” became a thing. The pandemic accelerated the trend. Can you make a living foraging mushrooms? Oh yes. The Japanese Matsuke sells for $1000-$2000 a pound. White Truffles sell for $3600 a pound. Morel’s are $250 a pound when dried. Chantarelles are $225 a pound dried. Porcini, Shitake and Oyster mushrooms sell for a lot less but you can feed a family on all this for free if you have foraging skills. Perhaps Tsing’ most important point is that you can make a healthy living outside the capitalist jobbing economy if you learn how to find and transport these gems. Forgers figure out nuts, berries, honey and other freely growing delights pretty quickly too.
Skincare: The biggest new trend from 2020 onwards has been mushroom skincare. Chaga mushrooms are finding their way into skincare because they are apparently “one of the most antioxidant-rich foods in the world” and “ three times more effective at fighting free radicals than acai berries” according to the founder of Plant People, Gabe Kennedy. Products are appearing on the shelves that use Tremella mushrooms like like Herbivore Pink Cloud Rosewater + Tremella Creamy Jelly Cleanser and Tata Harper’s Califying Moisturizer.
Construction materials: Some are trying to make bricks and building materials out of mushrooms. It seems concrete emits four times as much carbon as the entire global aviation industry.
via @YouTube
Food as medicine: Mushrooms are increasingly understood to be not only healthy but potentially anticarcinogenic. As a result people are seeking out mushrooms to ingest. Andrew and Simon Salter recently launched Dirtea which has a chance of being the new Kamboucha. They own the largest mushroom farm in the world and delivers “purest and most potent functional mushroom powders available”. It’s been a hit! Also, scientists are fast discovering that fungi plays a critical role in the microbiome, which in turn strongly defines the health of humans.
Of course, it is now obvious that hallucinagenic mushrooms are not only being legalized in various parts of the world but the FDA is starting to approve them as treatments for all kinds of psychological woes. The legalization of marijuana generated $2.7b in taxes in the American states that legalized it, prompting other states (now 14 in total) to follow. The “green rush” has generated a record $17.5b in sales in 2021 which was a 46% increase over 2019. The FDA has been fast tracking approals of psilocybin for the treatment of depression. They have labelled it a “breakthrough therapy” twice now. Clinical trials are ongoing at major universities across the world now. One imagines many many people are going to claim that they are very depressed and need this treatment. Mushrooms are not the only psychadelics, but the overall market for psychadelics is projected to reach $10.7 b by 2027. That’s about the same size as the global “influencer” market.
Perhaps the most interesting impact of mushrooms is on philosophy and history. For centuries humans have used mushrooms to achieve altered states of consciousness and to obtain the feeling of communing with the divine. Georgio Samorini wrote a paper in 2019 called, “The oldest data evidencing the relationship between Homo Sapiens and psychoactive plants: A Worlwide Overview.”
President Nixon banned most of these substances in 1971. Slowly the prohibition is unwinding and causing a huge new sector of the economy to spring to life. As this restoration occurs, philosophers and historians are starting to reconsider past explanations. Michael Pollen opened the door to this subject with his award winning book on this subject, How to Change Your Mind. He explores mushrooms more deeply in This is Your Mind on Plants.
Merlin Sheldrake won the 2021 Royal Society Science Prize for his efforts to explain how deeply intertwined the history of humanity has been with mushrooms. Brian Murarescu is a lawyer who studied Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. In The Immortality Key: The Secret History of a Religion with No Name, he concludes that mushrooms and other hallucinagenics have been at the core of all religions and periods of history marked by great cultural attainments. Meanwhile, advancements in MRI scans and clinical trials at places like Imperial College pioneered by Robin Carhart-Harris are causing experts to question the concept of consciousness itself and the impact of mushrooms and such substances on it.
We seem to rediscovering a sector in the economy that’s been around for millennia. Remember Ötzi the Iceman? He was found in 1991 on the Austrian border high in the alps. He lived some time between 3350 and 3105 BC and had a bellyfull of birch polypore medicinal mushrooms when he died. Maybe there is a reason we find so many mushrooms in Pre-Columbian and ancient Greek art?
All this adds up to a world where people will start saying “I want to be a mycologist”. Mushrooms are going to generate an extraordinary number of new jobs, new businesses, new technologies and techniques, new ways of doings things and new ways of thinking.
Next time someone says, there won’t be any new jobs, don’t say “bull shi*”. Just say “mushrooms” (some of which grow most happily on bull shi* actually).
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Ohhh my mistake!!! It is Adidas!! I’ll fix that!
Replaced drinking daily coffee for Om mushroom hot chocolate. No more SBUX runs.