“You can make everything from mushrooms: from household items to medicines”: an interview with mycologist Mikhail Vishnevsky

Mikhail Vishnevsky is one of the most famous mycologists in Russia. He maintains his own blog and writes books. We spoke with him about what the real potential of mushrooms is and why scientists are becoming more and more interested in them.

About mushrooms and opening a pharmacy

Why are you interested in mushrooms? Why did you decide to become a mycologist?

- Attachment to mushrooms is the merit of my father. From the age of two, he began to take me to the forest. He taught me to identify dozens of edible and poisonous species.

Also, since middle school, I've been thinking like a naturalist with a broad profile: Darrell, Drozdov were my idols. I ran to lectures to Nikolai Nikolaevich.

I was interested in a lot of things - from genetics to ichthyology. But for some reason, I reacted to the message of the Department of Lower Plants - now it is called the Department of Mycology and Algology.

It was headed by Yuri Tarichanovich Dyakov, a brilliant specialist and an incredibly smart, charismatic person. Since then, it's gone. I have been working with mushrooms for 30–35 years.

- As far as I know, you have been selling mushrooms since the age of 6?

- It was business. As the English say: "Shit happens." I remember very well how, sitting on Novomytishinsky Prospekt, I sold handfuls of aspen mushrooms and boletus, 50 kopecks - pigs. As it turned out later, the latter are dangerous, they should not be eaten.

My father walked home from work past this disgrace. I saw how he went around me, pretending that it was not his child. It's not at all Soviet.

When I had to run away to watch "Visiting a Fairy Tale", I negotiated with the grandmothers who traded next to me. They sold mushrooms instead of me, and when I returned, they paid honestly.

- It seems that even then an entrepreneurial vein appeared in you. Tell us how your business related to mushrooms developed in the future?

- Everything that is somehow connected with mushroom commerce, my wife Elena Alexandrova and I began to develop 10 years ago.

First, we founded a retail outlet on the Danilovsky market in Moscow, and at the same time we began to supply restaurants with various mushrooms - from fresh to harvested. It lasted quite a long time, but at some point I realized that I was getting a little bored with this story.

In addition, I have accumulated emotional stress: for many years I have heard that mushrooms are not recognized as medicinal in modern Russia. For me it was amazing.

After all, the whole world, including Big Pharma, which will not spend an extra dollar on unverified information, has long been developing sports nutrition, nutraceuticals, drugs, dietary supplements based on mushrooms.

I thought that we also need to create such products, based on the latest scientific research. In addition, it corresponds to the modern agenda - "eco", "bio", "vegan". Focusing primarily on young people, we started preparing the first functional nutraceutical mushroom products.

Therefore, in 2019 we launched a pharmacy. In just a quarter, we realized that we were on the right track, and closed the point on Danilovsky.

— You said that when developing products, you rely on scientific research. What is this research? Who conducts them?

— Yes, my wife and I spend two-thirds of our working time analyzing modern scientific literature. For this, there is an excellent resource PubMed. There we keep track of recent articles and reports on experiments - especially those related to preclinical and clinical trials. mushrooms.

At the same time, we have our own research base. I cooperate with Russian and foreign universities, institutes, laboratories. Thanks to them, for example, I establish the toxicological safety of products.

— How are medicines in your pharmacy certified?

— The vast majority of our drugs are designed as food supplements. Their certification is pretty simple. It is necessary to undergo laboratory tests that confirm the absence of classical pathogens and heavy metals: lead, cadmium, mercury. Plus we have our own analysis for radioactivity.

Because in Russia, unfortunately, there are quite a few places where the indicators of radionuclides in soils exceed the permissible value by 7–50 times.

This is our principled position: we work only with Russian raw materials and only with wild plants. Therefore, we strictly treat the resources that we receive from the territory of our country.

— Because wild-growing mushrooms and plants contain more biologically active substances than cultivated ones?

— Yes, there are about a dozen studies about this. Wild mushrooms have more biologically active substancesthan in mushrooms that were grown by an industrial agro-complex.

This is normal. It is explained by the fact that many of the biologically active substances useful to humans are produced by fruit mushroom bodies as a response to external stresses: sudden changes in temperature, ultraviolet radiation, drought, insect attack and other.

If the mushroom grows in a greenhouse, then it is practically devoid of stress. The temperature difference is a few degrees at most. Humidity and lighting are constant. No pests attack. Therefore, those substances that should have been produced due to stress do not do this.

About fungi, mycophobes and mycophiles

— Why do you prefer to work only with Russian raw materials?

- I start from a rather abstract message, which has not been proven in any way. What is close to us, the inhabitants of Russia, what has grown on our land is, most likely, what our ancestors ate. Our metabolism perceives such mushrooms better than some exotic species that neither we nor the generations before us have ever encountered. I am aware that this is most likely a false premise.

But I am pleased to realize that thanks to this principle, at least I give real work to ordinary Russians who live in villages. Having received appropriate training from my assistants, they prepare cool quality raw material, in which I am sure. And I am pleased, and the guys have a great increase in their pension, which exceeds this very pension. I feel like I'm doing something useful and fair.

- It was a surprise to me that historically the collection and eating of wild mushrooms is a Slavic cultural phenomenon. And in Western European countries and the United States, a wild‑food trend has only recently emerged. Could you talk about how mushroom culture differs in different countries?

- The collection of mushrooms, food and medicinal, really varies from country to country. Robert Gordon Wasson, the man who founded ethnomycology as a science, divided countries into mycophobic and mycophilic.

The main mycophiles are Africans and Slavs. Africa, our common homeland, turned out to be friendly to people: it is full of edible medicinal mushrooms. And also extremely poor in poisonous. Therefore, initially humanity was formed as mycophilic.

But when it entered Eurasia and reached Australia, people began to encounter different species, including poisonous ones. And depending on how successful or unsuccessful this experience was, they formed a different attitude towards mushrooms.

In classical European myth-making, for example, they are usually associated with chthonic characters - witches, spiders, snakes, ghosts. Anglo-Saxon civilization treated them negatively.

Until the 19th century, they believed: if a person eats mushrooms, he is either a poor man or a psycho.

When the British settled in North America, of course, this attitude carried over there. The global civilization of English-speaking white people was negatively disposed towards mushrooms.

The Slavic community that inhabited the territory of the present central part of Russia, as well as the countries of Eastern Europe - Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria - on the contrary, had a positive attitude towards mushrooms. It was a traditional food product that was collected almost all year round.

In Asia, mushrooms were not eaten - they were used as medicines.

Now this picture has changed dramatically. Quite unexpectedly, mushrooms responded to the message of young Anglo-Saxons for "eco", "bio", "veganand other related to responsible consumption.

On this basis, the classic Western mycophobia was replaced by an incredible mycophilia. I call this the third mushroom wave - it is high-tech, medical, mycopharmaceutical.

What were the first two?

- The first wave - food, at the beginning of the 20th century. At that moment, people learned how to grow mushrooms, began to massively collect them and use them in cooking.

The second is medicinal, from the second half of the 20th century. Then antibiotics began to be made from mushrooms. Also, scientists managed to find out the medicinal properties of mushroom polysaccharides and other substances.

About mushrooms and the future

“Now there is talk of global warming. How does fungal diversity and their range change? How does this affect people?

Yes, global warming is irreversible. This is not a myth, but, as the Marxists said, a reality given to us in sensations. We see how the climate is changing all over the planet - it is sausage: somewhere typhoons, somewhere hurricanes.

And because of this, over the past 20 years, the mushroom picture in Russia has changed significantly:

• Quite visibly, we have an increase in the fruiting season of mushrooms, because, on average, winters become warmer and rainier.
• There is a gradual change from northern to southern mushrooms. In the south of the European part, for example, Mediterranean mushrooms begin to appear en masse - as edible, and poisonous.
• The number of desert, semi-desert and steppe species begins to increase, because there is a clear impoverishment of water reserves.

In general, there is a redistribution of the entire planetary space, and the mushroom picture is changing rapidly. All old proverbs and folk wisdom such as “after the summer they don’t go looking for mushrooms” or “in winter they would eat a fungus, but snow fell” are in the past. At one time I wrote the book "For Mushrooms from November to May." That's right, not the other way around.

As a result: mushrooms have become collect more. But still not as much as in tsarist Russia. The maximum mushroom consumption was in the zero years of the last century.

In 1900–1908, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the amount of mushrooms eaten per inhabitant was 70–90 kg per year. Now - about 10 kg per year. That is, 100 years ago we ate eight times more mushrooms. I think we are moving in that direction again.

— Now many people are trying to find eco-friendly alternatives to the objects around us. I know that you have been thinking about a project to create paper from mushrooms for a long time. Please tell us about it.

— I think that this year we will put forward many new interesting projects. This will include the creation of mushroom functional food - from snacks to drinks - and the manufacture of mushroom skin, and the production of small household items and everything related to mushroom biobuilding.

Among other things, we really seriously dealt with the issue of making mushroom craft paper. There are a whole bunch of cafes and restaurants that are already queuing and waiting for us to release it so they can print their menus on it.

It must be understood that mushroom paper is a very conditional name. After all, what is it? This is a mycelial mat of a certain thickness. If you collect several thin layers into one, they become mushroom skin, from which it will be possible to make handbags, sneakers, car seat covers.

And if you grow this mat thick, then we get a mushroom meat. Moreover, it will combine all, without exception, the positive properties of plant and animal foods, and also add something of its own, mushroom.

After all, mushrooms contain powerful antioxidants that give an anti-age effect, protect against inflammation, neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer's and Parkinson's), metabolic syndrome - a complex of diseases that includes diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and so on. All this mushrooms are able to prevent much better than plant and animal products separately.

Also now we are working on the creation of mushroom pads, insoles, disposable tableware.

All this is biodegradable, so it will be perfectly disposed of. I threw it into the garden under the rain, and it instantly went into the ground, again becoming part of nature.

From mushrooms you can do everything - from household items to medicines. And the cool thing is that it's easy! Despite all the incredible difference in the various products obtained, the technological process is approximately the same.

We can grow a chair or a table lamp from mushrooms if we give them a certain shape of substrate that they will "grow". After that, we will put it in a tiled oven and bake it. With the help of temperature, we can adjust the strength and other properties of the future product.

From mushrooms we can even make concrete! Due to their physical and mechanical properties, spores can change volume depending on the weather - they expand and contract. This will prevent damage to the concrete. We get a breathable material that will not collapse in any frost or heat.

Not only will I not be surprised - I know for sure that the future of biotechnology lies with mushrooms. Why? The fact is that they have the richest enzyme system of all the kingdoms on the planet. It is thanks to her that mushrooms have mastered such food as food for themselves, which is extremely difficult to digest, no other organisms in the world can eat it. For example, they can destroy lignin, the hard part of wood.

That is why future nanotechnologies are already being developed on the basis of fungal molecules and their enzymes. Mushrooms are incredible.