When you sit down to your next portobello pizza or mushroom risotto, please ponder just how amazing these life forms are. They are essential to healthy soil, they break down decaying cellulose based materials, like dead tree trunks and some of the more exotic ones even feast on dead insects. What is perhaps more remarkable about mushrooms and other fungi is their medicinal properties and their stunning abilities to break down toxic spills or other waste products and convert them into edible protein rich food.
One example in point is a recent project in Mexico to deal with the ever present societal issue of diapers filling landfills. Few folks want to wash diapers these days, so the reality of disposable diapers is quite certainly here to stay.
When we have important issues that do not yet have satisfactory answers we should try to look at them in new ways. Take the humble mushroom for example. We already know that it can be great at breaking down pollutants, both chemical and biological. Disposable diapers represent an immense slow to go problems that contributes to filling up our landfills. Well feast on this fact. Researchers at the Metropolitan University in Mexico City have found a mushroom that will have diapers for breakfast lunch and dinner.
Waste Management the journal, recently published and article by Alethia Vázquez-Morillas. Her research states that by cultivating the right type of mushroom on soiled diapers it is possible to break down 90% of the material they are made of within two months. Within four, they are degraded completely. Though their diet is rather stinky, these fungi , Pleurotus ostreatus, or oyster mushrooms in you and me speak, are safe to eat. To prove the point she herself has eaten them.
Many mushrooms have the appropriate enzymes to feed on plant matter and cellulose in particular. Oyster mushrooms are the perfect contender for this job because they are very partial to cellulose which is the main material used in disposable diapers. This revolutionary use for mushrooms can do two fantastic things that are mutually beneficial for humanity, crate a food source out of waste.
Different types of fungi have been used to break down oil and chemical spills so this whole theme is one I believe we must explore to yield present and future benefits. All of these miraculous uses for mushrooms does not even touch on their medicinal properties.