…Continuing to Share from my ‘Mushrooms 3.0’ presentation from last week entitled: “Grain of Truth: Mushrooms, Labels and the Value of Biodiversity”.
This discussion on quality & dilution of functional mushrooms is larger than just one type of product.
It relates heavily to biodiversity, and the good stewardship of our natural world.
You might be thinking: many of these mushrooms are cultivated, so why talk about biodiversity?
Heres why: Every cultivated mushroom started as wild biodiversity. Lions mane, reishi, cordyceps: they all came from an ecosystem somewhere, and the strains we grow still depend on that wild genetic diversity.
We’ve described fewer than 10% of the worlds fungi. The next great functional mushroom is out there right now, and it may not even have a name yet.
➡️ Some are still wild, some are harvested ethically creating local bioeconomies, and some are in trouble.
Chaga is still mostly harvested from birch trees in the wild, and a single conk can take decades to grow. Chinese catarpiller fungus is listed as Vulnerable. Agarikon, the old-growth polypore, is listed as Endangered.
And More than a thousand fungi are now on the IUCN Red List.
➡️ And people dont save what they dont value.
That’s why dilution matters. When a bottle of rice or oats sells as reishi, it doesn’t just shortchange the consumer. It takes value away from the honest grower, from the careful wild harvester, and from the forests and discoveries they depend on.
The market stops paying for the real thing. In addition, if consumers buy these products and don’t get the intended effect, they devalue the species as a whole.
❌ This can ruin the reputation of specific fungi, when in fact they never bought the real thing in the first place.
This not only hurts the consumer, it hurts the industry as a whole. If we want people to value biodiversity and this Functional Mushroom category to survive, *the mushroom or mycelium has to actually be in the bottle.*
If you want to access this talk and the rest of the Naturally Informed series, you can get On Demand here: https://naturallyinformed.net/2026-supply-chain-on-demand-registration/