Why can a Russian spend an entire afternoon foraging for mushrooms in the forest with the same devotion that an Englishman dedicates to avoiding them entirely? The seemingly trivial question gave rise to a concept that ethnomycology still uses today: the dichotomy between mycophilia and mycophobia.
A Term with Two Origins
The term mycophobia was coined as early as 1887 by British mycologist W. D. Hay to describe the generalized fear of fungi in Anglo-Saxon culture. But it was the couple Valentina Pavlovna Wasson — a Russian-born pediatrician — and Robert Gordon Wasson who, in their 1957 book Mushrooms, Russia and History, formalized the complete dichotomy: the deep Slavic fondness for collecting and eating wild mushrooms versus the Anglo-Saxon distrust of the same organisms. The distinction was born, according to the authors themselves, from firsthand observation of how their marriage combined two opposing cultural attitudes towards the same forest.
Not a Straight Line
Decades later, a field study among highland and lowland communities in Chiapas, Mexico, tested the dichotomy quantitatively. The results showed something more complex than a simple spectrum: sociocultural variables — not just the ecological availability of fungi — better explain attitudinal differences, and the mycophilia-mycophobia phenomenon is not distributed as two opposite poles but as a continuous and multi-causal one.
Legislation as a Cultural Mirror
Another European study compared regulations on wild mushroom trade between countries and found that the regulation itself reflects deep cultural attitudes: the first rules on wild mushroom sales in the Western world emerged in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1820, after repeated episodes of poisoning associated with intense mushroom trade in northern Italy — indirect evidence of a markedly mycophilic culture that needed to regulate itself.
References
- Ruan-Soto F, Caballero J, Martorell C, Cifuentes J, González-Esquinca AR, Garibay-Orijel R. Evaluation of the degree of mycophilia-mycophobia among highland and lowland inhabitants from Chiapas, Mexico. J Ethnobiol Ethnomed. 2013;9:36. DOI: 10.1186/1746-4269-9-36
- Peintner U, Schwarz S, Mešić A, Moreau PA, Moreno G, Saviuc P. Mycophilic or mycophobic? Legislation and guidelines on wild mushroom commerce reveal different consumption behaviour in European countries. PLoS One. 2013;8(5):e63926. PMID: 23704957.