Story: Mushrooms - Are They Art or Can You Eat Them?

Mushrooms belong in the pan, with saddle of venison steak or in tasty pasta dishes. We know about their link to lifesaving penicillin and we’re familiar with them in the form of a yeast fungus for making beer and bread. But according to scientists such as Vera Meyer and Philipp Benz, mushrooms will likely revolutionise our lives in the near future. Not only will they be used in the kitchen, but also as tiles on the kitchen wall or as bricks in the foundations of houses. Mushrooms are already used in the production of food, detergents, paper, fuel and medicines. Several everyday objects would not exist were it not for the use of fungal biotechnology. For Vera Meyer, professor, artist and head of Applied and Molecular Microbiology at TU Berlin, ‘Mushrooms are the way to convert our petroleum-based economy into a bio-based one’. Mushrooms are neither animals nor plants, but form their own kingdom within nature, called fungi.

According to estimates, there are around six million different species worldwide that comprise several different kinds of characteristics. The largest living organisms in the world are not in fact whales in the oceans or elephants on land, but a fungus in Oregon, USA. The giant, which is known as the ‘Dark Honey Fungus’ (Armillaria ostoyae), covers an area of 9.65 square kilometres, which equates to around 1,352 football pitches. It is somewhere between 1,900 and 8,650 years old.

Only around 150,000 types of mushroom have been scientifically investigated so far, but even these have made a huge contribution to making our world a healthier, more sustainable and more liveable place – they save resources and can be recycled. Fungal substances can replace building materials such as concrete and plasterboard, leather as an item of clothing and packaging made from plastic. The Italian designer Maurizio Montalti and his company Mogu have even developed floors and wall tiles made from mushrooms. Proof of their sustainability lies in their energy footprint: to create bio-bricks, i.e. bricks made from biological substances, temperatures of between 70 and 120 degrees are required. For stone bricks, a temperature of up to 1400 degrees is needed.

Protein-rich meat substitute products made from mushrooms are on trend, and not just for vegetarians. The taste and texture of some mushrooms is even very similar to meat. However, the production of meat substitute products using mushroom mycelium has now taken off. There’s a good reason for this: the mushroom meat from the bioreactor is substantially more efficient and sustainable than the animal original. Ten times the amount of water is required to make the same amount of protein from beef as we get from mushrooms and double the amount of water is required to get the same amount of protein from chicken. Mushroom meat is also very healthy and contains lots of proteins, amino acids and fibre.

For Vera Meyer, mushrooms are not just the construction materials of the future or meat substitutes of the present, but also art objects that she is passionate about: ‘I build sculptures made from chance finds, such as bracket fungi and rotten wood as well as thrown away objects and items that appear to no longer be useful, such as scrap and disposable materials. I want to give the transient and discarded a new, unplanned (co-) existence’, she says. She also works with a lot of gold in her art projects, ‘in order to draw a new kind of attention to these rewoven things that appear to be useless by cloaking them in the golden robe of death’. Her art is also influenced by her scientific work, she says. It changes her perspective and helps her identify new structures, characteristics and possibilities. ‘The artistic view of an object or organism can give scientists unexpected ideas’. Leonardo da Vinci was, after all, an artist as well as an inventor, engineer and anatomist.