dedicated to Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche; one of my greatest mentors and inspirations
…
as an old mycologist i am loth to admit of that one scruple that, like an uninvited but irresistible chef who makes such demands of my taste and appetite as to call these my ‘a priori’ of seasoning, i should take up as my phylogenic task alone, to draw the distinction between true morels and false morels. the first impulse to speak something of my hypothesis came about in the midst of a seemingly precocious affair; the gyromitrin of a false morel i had consumed while at a holiday inn salad bar, was hydrolyzed into a toxic compound known as monomethylhydrazine. i experienced a severe weakening of the body, and for days contended with bouts of nausea and dizziness.
it was perhaps here that the thought occurred to me, that insight during the greatest, heaviest moment of doubt, when everything one once held to so firmly is called upon for the most incriminating of questions. how does the false morel originate, and why is it here at the salad bar?
the false morel, of the genuinely scandinavian type, is found in degenerate conditions; the disturbed ground of the deciduous woodlands and among conifers, exhibiting an extraordinary endemism. one must ask; has such circumstances hitherto hindered or furthered the the growth of anatomically simpler fungi closer to the order of ascomycota, the true morel? or is this a sign of distress and taxonomic impoverishment characterizing the cultivation of all morels, true and false?
thereupon i discovered and ventured ecologist questions. i distinguish between culinary ages, cooks and chefs, degrees of rank among mushrooms. i departmentalized my problem and sought across vast expanses of time that one deciding feature; the disambiguation of the intentions of mushroom trade.
again i found simpler problems, free from the multifarious complexities of my initial investigation. i opened my ears again and could now hear what the chefs have been saying.
“we good chefs- we are the just” - what they desire they call, not plebian tastes, but ‘the triumph of the import of mediocre fungi’, this they call the triumph of culinary justice.
it was their sweetest revenge… this reduction of everything distant and pure to the commonplace, the reduction to the convenience of the patron at the salad bar. and oh what irony! a false morel… a fungi for a fun guy! homer called this revenge ‘sweeter than honey’… but nothing is so sweet to the fun guy as the acrid tinge on the tongue of a false morel!
but we others, we who have more delicate tastes because we have tasted so much, a sensitivity to all that defines and distinguishes a fungi from the common mushroom marketplace; we are the ones to whom the true morchella belongs.
when that great modern noise of the multimillion-dollar commercial harvesting industry of false morels becomes so loud as to shake the very ground upon which the salad bar stands… we look away, we walk away and take our plates elsewhere. but our consciences ask us; do you walk away in search of true morels, or as just another disgruntled customer? do you seek the real morchellaceae, or just a copy? perhaps you seek a copy of a copy. first question of taste and appetite.