Forming Relationships with Fungi (And the Brutality of It)
I love fungi deeply. Of the 10 most important relationships in my life, at least three are with fungal individuals. My relationship with these individuals has spanned years; countless projects, hardships, developmental milestones, enthralling successes and bitter failures. I’ve known these individuals from the intimacy of a petri dish to the unforgiving scale of a factory. I’ve reached a level of mediation with these individuals that, at times, feels conversational. These strains have seen and experienced the absolute best and most reprehensible worst in me, and they have physically endured that full spectrum in the most visceral ways (the sheer volume of mycelium I have grown and ‘deactivated’ is staggering).
These fungal individuals are psychopaths; or better put, it is unreasonable but necessary for me to form these relationships for the sake of being an effective mycelium R&D professional. Let me explain.
In the current cultural moment, there is an impulse to humanize fungi in particularly benevolent terms. And while it can be a beautiful way of creating accessibility to the powerful qualities of fungi, I’ve learned firsthand that the reality is far less sentimental and far more interesting.
In my own experience, when you work with fungi long enough, and deeply enough, you stop experiencing them as anonymous biological processes and start recognizing them as individuals. Not species, strains, or acquisitions in a library, but quite literally unique individuals. And after years of cultivating the same individuals across dozens of processes, I know their idiosyncrasies like I know an old friend’s. I know how they behave when they’re thriving. I know what frustrates them. I know how they bend under stress and how they leap with exuberance under the right conditions. It feels exactly like being in a long-term relationship complete with joy, disappointment, patience, and (sometimes hard-won) understanding.
But here’s the uncomfortable part (at least for me): fungi are not human. And projecting humanness onto them is both a mistake and a subtle disrespect.
Because when you strip away the romance, when you look honestly at the organizing principles of fungi (their biochemistry, ecological roles, and evolutionary strategies) you quickly realize these organisms are built for ruthless, unfeeling efficiency. They are biological opportunists. Their growth is an aggressive foraging algorithm. Their interactions with each other, other organisms, with us, are driven by resource acquisition, territorial dominance, and biochemical warfare.
If you were to honestly anthropomorphize fungal behavior, you wouldn’t meet a wise old teacher. You’d land on something closer to a cold, calculating, but maybe charming psychopath.
And yet I form relationships with fungi. Because I believe to work effectively with fungi, especially in process design or material development, you have to. You have to invest the time to understand their behavior, to earn familiarity with their tendencies, to internalize how they respond to subtle changes. You form relationships not because they are like us, but because they are not, and perhaps by virtue can more honestly recognize the error in humanizing them. You form relationships because the only way to navigate their plasticity, their unpredictability, their merciless opportunism, is through relentless, patient familiarity.
The modern pop culture fascination with fungi often veers toward the whimsical. Mushrooms are framed as wise elders, mycelium as a benevolent internet, fungi as teachers of interconnectedness. And while there’s poetry in that, there’s also danger in losing sight of reality. So the art of forming relationships with fungi is allowing for the human impulse to form the relationship while maintaining an objective view of the fundamentally brutal aspects of what fungi are. And ultimately, that brutality defines the toolkit that allows us to make good things for humans.