Vancouver Mycological Society 30th Annual Mushroom Show: October 25, 2009

I attended the Mushroom show at the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens in Vancouver.  As I approached the entrance I was greeted with a live cooking demonstration and a purveyor of mushroom spawn for cultivation.  Inside a room was set up to display wooden trays of mushrooms grouped by their classification.  Groupings of mushrooms were  identified  as edible, poisonous, or worthless by paper tags clipped to wooden close pins.  People crowded around the tables handling, smelling and photographing the mushrooms.  Animated discussions in dfferent languages surrounded the tables.

If I were to display the people in attendance on little wooden trays, my identification tags might read “collector,” “gourmet,” and  “admirer.”  In thinking of the collectors, I am reminded by two older men with eastern european accents discussing this rather ordinary looking white mushroom in a glass jar.  The collector of the mushroom found it and two others, which he left with the VMS to be identified.  The next day only one mushroom remained. He kept shaking the mushroom around in the jar- a prize that had been found and captured by him.  The gourmet were clamoring around the cooking demonstration taking in the aroma of the Matsutake’s as they were being cooked in a light cream sauce.  Using a toothpick they stabbed and savoured the flavour of tiny pieces of mushroom caps and stems.  The admirers walked along hunched over the tables trying to get the perfect photograph of the unique mushrooms forms and colours.  At a separate table a woman demonstrated how to create spore prints for identification and aesthetic enjoyment of the wispy circular shapes comprised of millions of spores.

I purchased an identification chart of medicinal mushrooms and then headed for a lecture on “Mushroom Madness.” Duane Sept gave a brief talk on mushrooms that can be found in the local area.  Part way through the talk I noticed that I was beginning to pick up some common and Latin names for different species. It’s interesting how these classifications crowd in on other thoughts.  When I think of classification, I am reminded of grade seven biology where we were tested regularly on taxonomy.  The lab was set up with 2 or 3 jarred specimens at each lab station.  We were given a few minutes at each station to write down the classification and then time was called and we had to rotate to the next station.  Floating snakes, frogs and worms were suspended in time for the purpose of our learning.  The pedagogical function of these specimens intrigue me.  They serve to sort and categorize the living world while somehow removing humans from that very world.  In contrast the mushroom specimens collected by hobbyists serve multiple functions aside from the laboratory context.  These specimens allow people to relate to the mushrooms as food, as aesthetic objects and as rare prizes.