Ariel Gordon's Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest

Reviewed by Adam McPhee

(Wolsak & Wynn, 2024)

​There’s an interesting essay in Ariel Gordon’s Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest in which the author finds employment as a harvester at an indoor mushroom farm in Winnipeg. The author says of her peat-scented work environment, “entering the factory was like entering the faery lands. The time inside was endless and uncounted, while the outside world continued as it had.”

About half of the mushrooms consumed in North America come from one of several production facilities in Pennsylvania, owned by the parent company of the Winnipeg farm/factory. Between the South Mill Champs facilities in Pennsylvania, Winnipeg, and British Columbia, they’re able to cover both coasts and the centre of the continent, getting mushrooms to their customers within 48 hours most days of the year. (As it happens, I once heard a very entertaining conspiracy theory about this particular near-monopoly).

The cost of this efficiency is that the work is physically demanding: in their first month, workers are expected to pick twenty pounds of mushrooms an hour. Racks of mushroom beds filled with compost and peat are stacked vertically, so workers sit on milk crates to get at the bottommost mushrooms, and later, after training, work on lifts, sometimes for eight hours at a time, to reach beds stacked five levels high.

Like most agricultural labour, the hardest work is carried out by immigrants and whatever we’re calling the temporary foreign worker program these days. At one point the author is mistaken for a manager, as no one expects a white woman among the workers. The author reports she left the job shortly after her training period ended, once the physical pain and loneliness from an inability to make friends with her co-workers grew to be too much.

Paradoxically, there is a real novelty, at least for us outsiders, in reading about the procedures and protocols of this tedious, mind-numbing work. I’m reminded of CBC’s long-running program Land & Sea, except, y’know, this is inland. I think we need more of this sort of thing in Canada, whether written or otherwise. Stuff that looks at the lives and challenges of working people. It doesn’t even have to be The Road to Wigan Pier: most of the author’s knowledge of the mushroom industry seems to come straight from the company’s website.

The essays in Fungal are somewhat barren in terms of mushroom facts. Not that I was expecting a textbook, but I found it odd that there’s a whole essay on the author’s collection of mushroom kitsch but only allusions to the mysterious role of mycelial networks in plant communication. Likewise, there’s an essay where the author uses mushrooms to decompose a copy of her previous book, but no exploration on the vital role fungi play in decomposing organic matter in the wider world.

The other essay that I found interesting is of a similar bent to the harvesting essay. In it, the author pieces together the working life of a biology professor whose office was once down the hall from hers, examining letters left inside some old mushroom books she’s scavenged from him. These letters from the general public are fascinating, asking him to identify their mushroom cuttings (plenty of which seem to melt in transit) and asking about old mushroom myths. The professor’s answers remind us that there was once a time before the internet provided us with easy answers, and that universities must have played a wider role in their communities.

Also worth mentioning is the author’s recounting of her time mudlarking, an odd hobby, digging up Winnipeg’s history in the mud of the Red River, sharing space with the homeless who camp there and seeing firsthand the climate-change-induced drought that shrivels and dries the river.

Otherwise the essays in Fungal tend towards a more personal nature, the sort of thing that might keep you invested in a friend’s blog or checking their social media pages. It’s an odd approach for a subject that seemingly demands we step outside ourselves, to encounter the familiar from an almost alien perspective. Needless to say, there’s no use of psilocybin/magic mushrooms, although on this I have to commend the author for avoiding what would probably have been, at best, a pointless stunt.

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​Adam McPhee is a Canadian author. His non-fiction writing has appeared in Heavy Feather Review and his fiction has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize. He writes the Substack newsletter Adam's Notes. He lives in Alberta.