First, let me get this out there: I HATE MUSHROOMS.  I think they are gross – gross to touch, gross to smell, gross to eat. Gross.   My distaste for mushrooms probably harkens back to when I was a toddler and ate a toadstool out of the yard, causing my parents to rush me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped.  This distaste grew as I attended St. Mark’s High School in Wilmington, DE where frequently on cool windy days, the smells of the Pennsylvania mushroom farms wafted across the campus (according to UC Davis, PA produces 44% of the US’s mushrooms). The hatred was cemented at the University of Virginia where I minored in Biology.  In the second semester bio lab, which I not only took but also TA’d, we spent weeks examining mushrooms under microscopes. My in-depth knowledge of basidia and cystidia guarantee that I do not eat or touch mushrooms if I can at all avoid it.  They are smelly, gross fungus.

Ok, now that I’ve offended all of you mushroom lovers…

I might be coming around on the nasty things.  I read a very interesting article in Time Magazine that makes me think mushrooms aren’t ALL bad. The article, Industrial Strength Fungus, discusses how mushrooms just may be the next super-eco building materials.

Essentially, researchers are finding that the “roots” of mushrooms (mycelium) are super strong, super durable, and super clean (minus, of course, that they are mushroom fibers – blech). Growing them, shaping them, and using them for construction materials is coming into a new field: Mycotecture. Check out a Flickr set on mycotecture.

As long as they grow the mushrooms somewhere far far away from me and my olfactory glands, I might be ok with this new use.