From ‘The Last of Us’ to Mushroom Girls: Why is Everyone Obsessed with Fungi All of a Sudden?

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“The memories of one are the memories of all. [...] The story of one is the story of all,” murmur the mushrooms in Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance, a polyphonic novel that gives equal weight to the perspective of humans as it does to clouds, dogs, mountains, and fungi.

A few months back, I began to realise how frequently I see mushrooms cropping up in media — in Netflix documentaries, dance performances, bio-architecture and high-fashion runways. Historically associated with decay and disease, I wondered about the origins of this shift in positive fungi reputation. A burgeoning interest in sustainable materials such as mycelial leather may be part of it; as is the aesthetic diversity of mushrooms, which lends itself very well to commercial ‘cuteness’ (in Ngai’s sense) — I’m guilty of making at least two pairs of mushroom earrings myself.

But what I’ve found most interesting is the fact that mushrooms seem to pose a utopian alternative to social isolation in an increasingly hyper-individualistic world. Fungi hold enormous symbolic potential — and we’re in the middle of an era of mycelial metaphor. Underneath the earth lies an expansive network of fungal threads, the hyphae. These fan out to all sides, interlock and branch apart in some sort of protean dance, probing for nourishment. The part that we see, the mushroom, is nothing more than the organism’s fruiting body: not a lone individual ballooning out of the soil, but part of something larger, supported by an entire subterranean network.

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In May, the U.S. Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy raised the alarm on a public health crisis: an “epidemic of loneliness”. His paper points out what many feel: that growing social isolation breeds despondency. 

A culture which deifies profit stands to gain a lot from solitude. A simplistic example: think of how many more refrigerators you can sell if people live in separate apartments (single households currently make up 30% of homes in the U.S.). That’s not to mention entire industries (hello self-help!) built off of keeping people isolated. We fetishise self-sufficiency. But as Sally Rooney so aptly put it in a recent interview, “You can’t just opt out of the rest of humankind.”

Fungi seem to embody an alternate mode of living — an explorative, webbed one, in which mushrooms inescapably link to one another. But they’re also tapped into the world around them: Trees and fungi work in symbiosis to supply each other with minerals, carbon, water, and sugars. Under the earth, it’s one big market square, where resources are exchanged free of charge, and often (though not always) in the interest of mutual benefit.

We’re suspicious of the idea of reciprocal care; hardened by a culture of exploitation. When researcher Albert Frank first posited the idea that both plant and fungus may gain something from this ‘symbiosis’ (a term he himself coined), he was ridiculed. His critics claimed that “[a]ny symbiosis that appeared to be mutually beneficial was actually one of conflict and parasitism in disguise”. But nearly 70 years later, Melin and Nilsson provided evidence of so-called ectomycorrhizal exchange: a positive symbiosis between different forest floor life is a proven reality. 

Scrolling through social media, I stumble across TikToks longing for accessible third places - spaces that aren’t home and aren’t work, but a separate place in which to simply exist, walkable communities, and structures of care. We’re becoming disenchanted with the fictitious promises of late-stage capitalism, and mourn for seemingly lost modes of communal living. Researcher David Read’s advice about plant-fungus relationships doubles as a lesson for us: to place “less emphasis on competition [between plants], and more on the distribution of resources within the community.”

Then there’s climate gloom, which prods at us constantly, and reminds us, in a much darker sense, of our interconnectedness. We are part of an ecosystem. Our fate relies on everything and everyone around us. Despite calculated attempts to spin climate change as individual responsibility — the concept of the ‘carbon footprint’, for instance, originated from a publicity campaign by BP — our looming fate rings in an era of interdependence, and of post-humanism. 

It makes sense to me that we’d gravitate towards fungi. They’re soft creatures with no concept of hard edges. Clear lines we take for granted disintegrate in the fungal realm — lines between different species, between individual and environment, between past and present, and between life and death.

In this context, it makes sense to me that we’d gravitate towards fungi. They’re soft creatures with no concept of hard edges; they hold space for spongy boundaries. Clear lines we take for granted disintegrate in the fungal realm — lines between different species (some species can mate with over seventeen thousand others), between individual and environment (in an interlocking network, organisms blend), between past and present (fungi were here long before us, some in incarnations reminiscent of a sci-fi film set), and between life and death (saprophytic fungi draw energy for new life out of decaying matter).

There’s a morbid fascination there: an attempt at coming-to-terms with our own mortality, as individuals and as a species. When we die, fungi will likely help decompose our bodies. And, propelled by rising global temperatures, fungi are growing increasingly tolerant to hotter environments, including the human body. A pandemic caused by fungal pathogens seems increasingly possible (the WHO released a fungal priority pathogens list for the first time last year). Shows like The Last of Us play on these darker associations, imagining a post-apocalyptic future in which a fungus turns its human hosts into zombies (inspired by the Ophiocordyceps fungus, which actually does this to ants). 

The dark side of fungal fascination reaches further than just a Freudian death drive. We’re a narcissistic species, incapable of picturing a world without humans – so we embrace the idea of interconnectedness as a way to see our matter live on, transmogrified. 

Drawing a distinct separation between us and our environment has allowed us to so thoroughly pillage the planet. Now we try to back-track; appoint fungi as our symbolic conductor. We read about Buddhist concepts of ‘interbeing’ and Ojibwe words that capture the aliveness of our surroundings without fully understanding them. We anthropomorphise. We write articles about what mushrooms can teach us about community.

Underneath our interest in toadstool makeup and grow-your-own-mushroom kits lies a deep emptiness. We’re grasping at hyphal promises, imagining communal forms of being. And we simultaneously remain sceptical of realising them in time, as we barrel towards the post-human together.

“There is no beginning and no end,” Solà’s mushrooms say. Our fascination with fungi is a byproduct of us grappling with the enormity of this recognition.

Words and Illustrations: Zoë Matt-Williams