More Mushroom Facts


  • Cultivated mushrooms are agaricus mushrooms grown on farms. Exotics are any farmed mushroom other than agaricus (think shiitake, maitake, oyster). Wild mushrooms are harvested wherever they grow naturally--in forests, near riverbanks, even in your backyard.

    portabello
    Will Heap/Getty Images
    Brown agaricus mushrooms include cremini and portobellos, though they're really the same thing: Portobellos are just mature cremini.

  • Many edible mushrooms have poisonous look-alikes in the wild. For example, the dangerous "yellow stainer" closely resembles the popular white agaricus mushroom.

  • Toadstool is the term often used to refer to poisonous fungi.

  • In the wild, mushroom spores are spread by wind. On mushroom farms, spores are collected in a laboratory and then used to inoculate grains to create "spawn," a mushroom farmer's equivalent of seeds.

  • A mature mushroom will drop as many as 16 billion spores.

  • Mushroom spores are so tiny that 2,500 arranged end-to-end would measure only an inch in length.

  • Mushroom farmers plant the spawn in trays of pasteurized compost, a growing medium consisting of straw, corncobs, nitrogen supplements, and other organic matter.

  • The process of cultivating mushrooms--from preparing the compost in which they grow to shipping the crop to markets--takes about four months.

  • The small town of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, calls itself the Mushroom Capital of the World--producing more than 51 percent of the nation's supply.

  • September is National Mushroom Month.

  • One serving of button mushrooms (about 5) has only 20 calories and no fat. Mushrooms provide such key nutrients as B vitamins, copper, selenium, and potassium.

  • Some experts say the taste of mushrooms belongs to a "fifth flavor"--beyond sweet, sour, salty, and bitter--known as umami, from the Japanese word meaning "delicious."

This article was adapted from "The Book of Incredible Information," published by West Side Publishing, a division of Publications International, Ltd.