Fear of Mushrooms

Where the word mycophobia came from

Valentina and Gordon Wasson coined mycophilia and mycophobia in 1957 to categorise the strong and opposed feelings mushrooms produce, running from extreme aversion to intense liking. The pair was designed to sort peoples rather than patients: a mycophobic culture is one where mushrooms are shunned, and the term has been applied to whole nations ever since.

In Mesoamerica the categories were attached to terrain. Highland peoples were taken to be mycophiles and lowland inhabitants mycophobes, a division resting, as the researchers who later tested it noted, on little empirical evidence and few indicators.

Why the Chiapas study broke the dichotomy

A study published in 2013 put the proposition to work. Its authors interviewed people in ten communities, five in the highlands of Los Altos de Chiapas and five in the lowland Selva Lacandona, tested nineteen indicators of attitude, applied a Mycophilia-Mycophobia Index, and compared eleven models built on the beta probability-density function using the Akaike information criterion.

Three findings, and the middle one is the important one:

• most people held positive attitudes in both regions
• the classification produced two large groups, each containing highland and lowland towns together, so the geography did not sort them
• every fitted probability distribution came out bell-shaped, the signature of a continuous variable rather than two exclusive categories

If attitudes to mushrooms are distributed on a curve with most people in the middle, then mycophobia is not a type of person. It is a position on a scale, and the word names one tail of it. The model best supported by the data included occupation and ethnicity rather than altitude, with indigenous peasants showing the highest mycophilia.

Which cultures the word gets applied to

The literature that uses the term is confident about which peoples have it. A handbook on mushroom poisoning records that Swedish mycophobia was partly broken down after Napoleon's general Bernadotte was elected to the Swedish throne in 1818 and drew attention to the succulent properties of Boletus edulis, the cep.

A biologist's account from 1998 reports that mycophobia has taken root all over North America and that wild mushrooms are commonly regarded there with fear and mistrust, and that mushrooms are shunned in places where they could be put to particularly good use. An anthropologist writing about Malawi in 2009 observes that the antipathy towards fungi permeates English culture and that the attitude goes back a long way.

Those are claims about populations, sourced to observation rather than to survey, and the Chiapas study is what happens when somebody counts. It is worth noting which way the counting went: the expectation was two kinds of people and the finding was one distribution.

Why the caution here has a basis

Nothing in the sources describes a clinical case, a prevalence or a diagnostic listing. What separates this entry from the other food aversions in the catalogue is that the caution has a basis: some mushrooms are lethal, identification is genuinely difficult, and the handbook that supplies the Bernadotte anecdote exists because people are poisoned every year.

That makes mycophobia one of the entries where the proportionality test is hard to apply from outside. A person who will not eat wild mushrooms they did not identify themselves is being sensible. A person who will not eat a cultivated mushroom from a supermarket is doing something else, and no source here draws the line between them.