Morel Ideals: Having Your Anthropocentrism and Eating it Too

Mushrooms are having a moment. A visit to your local TJ Maxx will convince you these fungi have become the mascots of modernity—templates for everything from socks and clocks to ice cube trays and dog toys. In 2019, the FDA deemed psilocybin a “breakthrough treatment” for major depressive disorder.¹ In 2022, the New York Times declared mushrooms the “Ingredient of the Year.”² This enthusiasm has spread across fashion, wellness, entertainment, and even the funeral industry, where you can now pay for the privilege of having mushrooms spring from your decomposing flesh. It’s a staggeringly successful public relations story. No longer simply dirt-ridden decomposers, mushrooms have become the face of resilience: loveable, delicious metaphors for life and possibility in the midst of environmental crisis. 

Over the past decade, an entire crop of books has pinned humanity’s very chance at a future on the marvels of fungi.³ These texts are united in their observation that mushrooms embody their connection with one another and with the world around us. When we recognize this connection, the story goes, we’ll feel a sense of awe and wonder and epistemic humility that will inspire and teach and motivate us to live differently. Even Nicholas Money, whose Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines scorns “the fanatics who think fungi can save the planet,” agrees that an appreciation of fungi is an important part of the “terrestrial mission” to overcome the “appalling selfishness of human nature.”⁴ Fungi offer a breezy new metaphorical model for ethics, in which their innate biological functions are formalized into the highest level of abstraction—entanglement—and tethered to the most idealized forms of their outcomes: death into life! symbiotic survival! inevitable healing! 

Amid the ruins of progress, mushrooms offer new metaphors for thinking about possibility and about ourselves through ways of being that already surround us, rather than via some future striving toward an as-yet-unimaginable good. But evangelizing the fundamental glories of entanglement makes it all too easy to parade the essentializing work of naturalization under the banner of inspiration. We mistake wonder for a shift in our epistemological paradigms. We want, in other words, to feel like we are saving the world. 

The mushroom library’s most successful outgrowth is Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. An international bestseller, his book highlights the utility of fungal science in catastrophic times by detailing the many concrete ways in which “global crisis is turning into a suite of fungal opportunities.”⁵ Sheldrake explores the uses of fungi in all its forms—from lichen and psychedelic trips to fermentation and mycelium-based construction materials.⁶ But in the mushroom library, these fungal opportunities are as much about shifting conceptual paradigms as they are about changing material reality. When Sheldrake proposes that fungi might “trick us out of our preconceptions and give us a glimpse of new possibilities,” he isn’t referring only to the physical effects of psychedelics.⁷ Psylocibin is presented as just one of the ways in which mushrooms can shift our perspective. Simply recognizing the biological structures of fungi can teach us to think beyond the “I” and toward mutuality. Fungi, Sheldrake writes, live in “enmeshed worlds.” Lichens are “a product less of their parts than of the exchanges between those parts.” Mushrooms and humans are profoundly “entwined.”⁸

At the heart of mushroom moralizing is the belief that observing biology can teach us a transformative empathy. These authors explain the science of fungi as the paradigm of entanglement. There’s a certain flatness to fungal networks, according to Sheldrake. Fungi don’t have a brain or central operating system, making them easy biological metaphors for the very concept of relation itself.⁹ In 2011, Eugenia Bone offered an early articulation of what would later become an all-pervasive thesis: “[I]n light of the new science, the singular noun ‘I’ is obsolete because in reality, ‘I’ is a community.”¹⁰ Doug Bierend has provided the most explicitly political rendering of this claim. His In Search of Mycotopia recounts the stories of various activists, environmental groups, and professional and amateur mycologists who take up the mushroom’s example of mutuality to shape a better world “in a time of social and ecological collapse—or, to put it more optimistically, transformation.”¹¹ Bierend celebrates mushrooms as “allies in challenging patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism.” Fungi’s very existence, he suggests, is an act of defying all of the “supremacist worldviews that ignore the agency and interconnectedness of nature.”¹² 

Because their reparative work in nature can’t keep pace with our destruction of the planet, Bierend writes, we must turn to fungi as models for thought instead. “What makes fungi so compelling” are “the ways in which they can serve as partners, and even teachers, in the project of realizing more integrative, reciprocal ways of thinking, and therefore being.”¹³ This is the mycophile’s favorite story: Paying attention to fungi will make us better people, and being better people can help us save the world.

Fungi bring the good news of relationship. The key to their success as prophets is appearing as something we recognize while delivering news that we hadn’t. Which is why, if mushrooms could speak, they’d apparently sound a lot like Brie Larson. The Oscar-winning actress narrates the opening moments of director Louie Schwartzberg’s 2019 documentary Fantastic Fungi, which begins its exploration into the mysterious science of mushrooms by letting them introduce themselves through a two-minute-long, first-person paean meant to make fungi feel both intensely familiar and impossibly strange. They declare themselves, through Larson, to be timeless (“the pulse of eternal knowledge”) and ubiquitous (“Everywhere. In everything”), both part of humanity (“inside you”) and practically messianic (“we are resurrection, condemnation, and regeneration”).¹⁴ A series of images—the galaxy, the earth, clouds, waterfalls, human crowds, a casket, moss, a stop-motion clip of a rotting strawberry—accompanies this opening narration, meant to remind you of the interconnectedness of all things, including cycles of life and death. Schwartzberg’s fungi precede humans and will survive them; they constitute our worlds and our bodies; they are intertwined with all forms of life and utterly indifferent to our appreciation. “We flourish everywhere,” the mushrooms declare, “whether you believe in us or not.”¹⁵

Still, the film’s message is less about the indifference of nature to our destructive tendencies and more about the need to recognize ourselves as part of nature so that we will be motivated to save it. Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology, appears at the documentary’s conclusion to reassure us that a different future is really just about empathy. It’s a hopelessly optimistic thesis, born out of the wish that our consumptive, domineering stance toward nature is the result of confusion or oversight. Saving the world, according to Simard, is as easy as looking at it: “When we see it, we understand it. And when we understand it, we care about it. And when we care about it, we’ll do something to help save it.”¹⁶ But this empathy isn’t just about recognition and understanding. It’s also about retaining a sense of awe. Part of what mushroom writers like Sheldrake and Bierend want to preserve is the sense of something that escapes us. “Despite their nearness,” Sheldrake writes, “fungi are so mystifying, their possibilities so other.”¹⁷ Really understanding fungi means being “amazed  and confused  by their entangled lives.”¹⁸ Caring about mushrooms requires the distance wonder provides.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that at the center of so many recent mushroom books are iterations of the same double-edged anxiety about anthropocentrism. On the one hand, as Keith Seifert’s The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi suggests, there’s a reductiveness in the “animal chauvinism” of reading mushrooms as automatons that respond to their worlds via preprogrammed instinct.¹⁹ On the other hand, some books posit, if we try to understand mushrooms as our moral and spiritual peers, maybe we’re just projecting the human onto them. Michael Hathaway’s What a Mushroom Lives For suggests mushrooms should be read on their own terms as “diverse and superlative beings.”²⁰ But how do we do this? How, exactly, are we to think about things that are different from us other than by comparison? 

Our authors offer method itself as an answer: knowing mushrooms the way that mushrooms themselves know. “I never behave more like a fungus than when I’m investigating them,” Sheldrake asserts.²¹ Anna Tsing compares the chapters of her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, to “the flushes of mushrooms that come up after the rain,” erupting from a larger undergrowth of connections.²² “My experiment in form,” she writes, “and my argument follow each other.”²³ The hinge of the mushroom metaphor is ostensibly something we can’t impose on fungi because it is something we innately share with fungi: an existence dependent on relation.  

Entanglement, unlike progress, is natural, a foundational unit of life that we are not responsible for imposing but can respond to. “The uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift—and a guide,” writes Tsing, for our own uncontrolled, entangled lives.²⁴ Mushrooms share with us the fact of mutuality; mutuality is the necessary premise of metaphor. Because the hinge of the method-mushroom metaphor is relation, mushrooms emerge as a kind of symbol not only of entanglement, but also of noticing, recognition, and attunement—a specific, nonanthropocentric method for thinking, seeing, and acting. Tsing makes her turn to mycorrhizic multiplicities in order to, as she puts it, “explore the terrain [‘Anthropo-’] refuses to acknowledge.”²⁵ To think with mushrooms means thinking like them.²⁶

Crucially, this assertion of methodological overlap isn’t simply an epistemological claim. Tsing’s enthusiasm for the complex ecological commonalities between human and mushroom offers a clear example of what more avowed new materialists describe as an “ontology.” Beings are “multiplicities, assemblages, hybrids, resonance machines, sonority clusters, intra-actions, complexities, and viscous porosities”—a florid list of words meaning something quite simple: we are the product of our relations, “irreducibly composed.”²⁷ New ontologies of entanglement promise a primordial stew ofotherwise possibilities brought about by new interrogations of “fundamental categories.”²⁸ And yet, as Dixa Ramirez-D’Oleo reminds us in This Will Not Be Generative, the “ethics of becoming” so central to these projects “always remains rhetorical.”²⁹ Tsing, for example, describes the first task of our apocalyptic times not as learning how to survive but as learning “how to think about collaborative survival.”³⁰ No “ecological writer choo[ses to die] to become compost,” Ramirez-D’Oleo writes, mushroom authors included.³¹ And for whatever situated, embodied, contingent movement from concept to story that mushroom writers attempt to trace, their claim that form and feeling emerge together is betrayed by possibility itself. 

Mushrooms might be an act of revolution, metaphorically and literally decomposing hegemonic structures. But we could just as easily find in their biology a different fable. Mushrooms break down organic matter via the enzymes their hyphae emit into their surrounding environments. Dead things, broken down into digestible nutrients, become a fungus’s life source—a colonizing consumption. Some fungi only allow the parts of themselves to exist that can consume: Once the nutrients around the hyphae have been exhausted, the mycelium moves outward in a ring shape, extending itself into undigested territory and leaving the inner hyphae to die.³² Maybe our mushroom reveries entail the projection of our longing for an entire affective, conceptual, and political revolution onto beings whose driving desire is to digest the world around them in order to survive. 

Michael Lim and Yun Shu’s The Future Is Fungi is a book so emblematic of the mushroom library that it could read as parody—if parody weren’t anathema to the mycophile’s earnestness. Its introduction proclaims that fungi are “entering the cultural zeitgeist” before arriving at the revelation that they “teach us that we are all interdependent.”³³ “When we finally surrender our separateness,” the authors declare, “we realize that we are not inside of nature, but within it.”³⁴ But we knew that already. We already know our lives are a series of relationships; we know we are changed by those relationships; we know that mutual aid networks are effective; we know it’s bad to assert a greedy dominion over the nonhuman world; we know the world is in crisis. But we can’t stop breaking the news.

Situated firmly in the ongoing aftermath of economic destruction, Tsing urges us to—literally and metaphorically—hunt for mushrooms in order to find a new imaginary: one that reads our universal precarity as the immanent potential for a mycorrhizic mode of “mutualistic transformation.”³⁵ But in the end, we’re left imagining a world in which we go around awe-struck, imagining things we already know. The collapse of recognition and inspiration in each of these books leaves us where we started and asks us to feel differently about it. 

What really seems to be on offer is a vision of mushrooms as a mirror in which we can applaud our own newfound humility. At the heart of the mushroom library is a fiction: Attention to mutuality is goodness; how a person sees is a measure of how good they are.³⁶ This measure allows us to desire a lot and do very little, because we believe that our longing makes us good. We long for transformation: We want to touch what is dead and make something of it, to be productive in a way that heals. We want our breakdown to arrive at something other than death; we bury our corpses in mushroom suits so that we can arrive at the inevitability of our virtue: In death, we give life. We want our very existence to be a way of caring for something else. We want mushrooms to help us reimagine our anthropocentrism—and then we want to eat them. 

Perhaps there is no better example than a 2020 YouTube video titled “Merlin Sheldrake eats mushrooms sprouting from his book, Entangled Life.”³⁷ Seated at a table, the author fondles fungi growing from a copy of his book. Its spine can barely hold together the engorged text, swollen with clots of mushrooms branching out from the pages. How quickly the fungi devoured his writing was flattering at first, Sheldrake says, but then he remembered that the oyster mushroom is a mushroom of indiscriminate taste: crude oil, used cigarette butts, herbicide, international best-sellers. Oyster mushrooms will eat anything. But Sheldrake will too. He slices the Pleurotus from his pages, throws it into a pan with some garlic and oil, and then—literally—swallows his words. 

 ¹ D.J. Heal et al., “Psychedelics: Threshold of a Therapeutic Revolution,” Neuropharmacology 236 (2023): 109610. [Return to Section]

² Kim Severson, “How Will Americans Eat in 2022?” The New York Times, December 28, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/dining/food-trends-predictions-2022.html. [Return to Section]

³ Just as all mushrooms are fungi, but not all fungi are mushrooms, all of these books are about fungi, but not all of them focus on mushrooms. Still, for the examples listed here, mushrooms act as a marketable gateway into the world of mycology for a broader audience. One need only look at their titles and/or covers to recognize that even those books that focus on fungi more broadly often take mushrooms as their literal (and metaphorical) cover images: Eugenia Bone’s Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms (Rodale Books, 2011); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015); Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures (Random House, 2020); Doug Bierend’s In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms (Chelsea Green, 2021); Michael J. Hathaway’s What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (Princeton University Press, 2022); Keith Seifert’s The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi: Exploring the Microscopic World in Our Forests, Homes, and Bodies (Greystone, 2022); Michael Lim’s and Yun Shu’s The Future Is Fungi: How Fungi Can Feed Us, Heal Us, Free Us, and Save Our World (Thames & Hudson, 2022); Alison Pouliot’s Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms: Forays with Fungi Across Hemispheres (University of Chicago Press, 2023). This is not an exhaustive list of books about fungi written in the past decade; it does, however, demonstrate a longstanding and pervasive pattern, and the books’ ethos characterizes a vast amount of contemporary theory concerned with relations of entanglement, particularly recent ecocriticism and new-materialist discourses. [Return to Section]

⁴ Nicholas P. Money, Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines: Our Lifelong Relationship with Fungi (Princeton University Press, 2024), 68–73. [Return to Section]

⁵ Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 196. [Return to Section]

⁶ Ibid., 70–93. [Return to Section]

⁷ Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 15. On the whole, only small portions of these books engage with psilocybin itself, a compound that might be said to make the metaphor of thinking like or with mushrooms literal. Psychedelics connect regions of the brain that have long been cordoned off from one another, redirecting brain traffic along newly opened routes and reducing the use of the default mode network—the part of our brains that keeps our neural pathways running in their usual order (James J. Gattuso et al., “Default Mode Network Modulation by Psychedelics: A Systematic Review,” International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology [2023], 155). The drug makes it possible, in this reading, for patients to see a way out of their old stories by forging new connections. [Return to Section]

⁸ Ibid., 22, 88, 7, respectively. [Return to Section]

⁹ Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 50. [Return to Section]

¹⁰ Bone, Mycophilia, xviii. [Return to Section]

¹¹ Doug Bierend, In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2023), 278. [Return to Section]

¹² Ibid., 12. [Return to Section]

¹³ Ibid., 277. [Return to Section]

¹⁴ Louis Schwartzberg, dir., Fantastic Fungi (Moving Art Studio 2019), streaming on various platforms; see minutes 0:23, 0:55, 1:00, and 1:31, respectively. [Return to Section]

¹⁵ Ibid., 0:48–1:07. [Return to Section]

¹⁶ Ibid., 1:15:22–29. Mary-Jane Rubenstein asserts something similar: “It is only because we assume that rivers, soils, mountains, and rocks are not animate—let alone divine—that we can even imagine rerouting, poisoning, removing, or fracking them” (Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters, First ed. [Columbia University Press, 2018], 68). Recognizing humans as animate and divine, however, has assuredly not stopped us from rerouting, poisoning, or fracturing and contaminating them. [Return to Section]

¹⁷ Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 22. [Return to Section]

¹⁸ Ibid. [Return to Section]

¹⁹ Seifert, Hidden Kingdom, 9. [Return to Section]

²⁰ Hathaway, What a Mushroom Lives For, 8. [Return to Section]

²¹ Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 215. [Return to Section]

²² Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, viii. [Return to Section]

²³ Ibid., viii. [Return to Section]

²⁴ Ibid., 2. [Return to Section]

²⁵ Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 20. Tsing’s ethnography formalized what would become the mushroom library’s stylistic tropes: lyric raptures about the wonders of fungi, unflappable earnestness, endless mentions of entanglement, the exaltation of wonder itself, curiosity as an imperative, and sweeping critiques of capitalism, progress, and environmental degradation (Ibid., 23, 65, 22). The mushroom library relies on a grammar of scare quotes, neologisms, and hyphenated noun complexes as critical strategies—“I will be unapologetically fungomorphic,” Seifert proclaims in his introduction (Seifert, Hidden Kingdom, 9). “Us,” “them,” “I,” and “me” suddenly become suspect terms, incapable of capturing the “happenings” of “worlds-in-the-making” amid the “pericapitalist” “world-in-process” of “myco-diplomacy” (See, respectively, Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 18, 172; Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 255, 65, 264; and Bierend, In Search of Mycotopia, 29). This brave new linguistic world trades on the familiar in obvious ways, insisting that noticing the superficial is an act of the same startling, disruptive, transformative encounter that mushrooms themselves have to offer. In fact, fungi seem to inspire remarkably little poetic inspiration. [Return to Section]

²⁶ Taking the mushrooms’ foundational lesson—the value of relation-as-relation—as a direct ideal for action has also been deployed as an organizing strategy. Radical Mycology, a group founded by Peter McCoy in 2006 and the title of a corresponding guidebook published by McCoy in 2016, is just one of the many examples of fungal-like organizing featured in Bierend’s book (Bierend, In Search of Mycotopia, 135–59). [Return to Section]

²⁷ Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Introduction: Tangled Matters,” Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialism (Fordham University Press, 2017), 2. See also page 15 for Keller’s and Rubenstein’s extensive list of the sources where this language can be found. In Pantheologiesm Rubenstein refers to these as “para-scientific theories…loosely assembled under the category of theories of immanence, or of post- or nonhuman studies,” including “ecofeminisms” and “‘new’ materialisms” (24). I prefer Anna Kornbluh’s less charitable phrasing in Immediacy, Or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024): “the distributed interconnectedness of entanglement theory, promulgating the fancy that epistemic preferences will redress ecocide” (211). [Return to Section]

²⁸ Pheng Cheah as cited in Entangled Worlds, eds. Keller and Rubenstein, 3. The organic and inorganic, the living and lifeless, and subject and object—these binaries supposedly come undone at the site of vegetality. Jane Bennett, “Vegetal Life and Onto-Sympathy,” in Entangled Worlds, eds. Keller and Rubenstein, 89–110. [Return to Section]

²⁹ Dixa Ramírez-D’Oleo, This Will Not Be Generative (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 37. [Return to Section]

³⁰ Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 19. [Return to Section]

³¹ Ramírez-D’Oleo, Generative, 37. See Seifert’s admission that “I too sometimes feel that the fungi are both literally enabling me to digest the world that I eat and at the same time metaphorically turning me into their substrate, their food, even as I advocate on their behalf” (Seifert, Hidden Kingdom, 187). [Return to Section]

³² Heino Lepp, “The Mycelium,” Australian National Botanical Gardens, last updated January 2013, https://www.anbg.gov.au/fungi/mycelium.html. [Return to Section]

³³ Michael Lim and Yun Shu, The Future Is Fungi: How Fungi Can Feed Us, Heal Us, Free Us, and Save Our World (Thames & Hudson, 2022), 12, 14, 15, respectively. [Return to Section]

³⁴ Lim and Yun, Future, 15. [Return to Section]

³⁵ Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 258. [Return to Section]

³⁶ Thanks to Lukey Ellsberg for the following tweet on this subject: “Ok I’ll say it! Opinions are not politics! Good opinions aren’t even a prerequisite for good politics nor do they inoculate against bad politics,” Twitter (now X), August 27, 2021, https://x.com/LukeyEllsberg/status/1431306082639560708. [Return to Section]

³⁷ Merlin Sheldrake, “Merlin Sheldrake Eats Mushrooms Sprouting From His Book, Entangled Life,” June 2, 2025, posted January 23, 2025 by Merlin Sheldrake, YouTube, 2:24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJfDaIVl-tE. [Return to Section]

Jones, Lacey. "Morel Ideals: Having Your Anthropocentrism and Eating it Too" in Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Ecology, Mind, and the More-than-Human World, edited by Rachael Petersen, Russell Powell, and Natalia Scott Schwein. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026.  https://doi.org/10.70423/0003.06