MIGHTY mushrooms

Mushrooms aren’t just being cooked and fried these days – you can blend mushroom powder into your smoothies, drink mushroom tea, munch on mushroom chocolate and rub mushroom anti-ageing products on your skin. In New Zealand, most of us consider button mushrooms de rigueur, but they’ve recently been joined here by more exotic varieties such as oyster, shiitake, lion’s mane and turkey tail, which are being chopped and tossed by both restaurant chefs and home cooks alike.

Although mushrooms have been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years in Asia, where more than 100 varieties are used to treat cancer alone, it’s only relatively recently that they’ve been used or investigated for medicinal purposes here. In pre-colonial times, though, Māori knew what all the fuss was about and used certain mushrooms to treat all kinds of ailments. In the late 1800s, New Zealand even exported one variety to Asia.

Peter Buchanan, a scientist who has been studying fungi for 40-plus years, describes