Fungi aren't plants.

Post Reply New Topic

Fungi aren't plants. They are a separate kingdom.

Plenty of people refer to fungi as plants, but fungi are actually more related to animals.

But they are fun guys. Or... fun guy?

SSSShhhrooomzz. …. Mushrooms if properly collected and processed can be very good healthy additions to a humans diet. They are important healthy parts of the micro biome.

If mushrooms are more related to animals than plants, is it wrong for vegans to eat them?

I do not know why you had the need to share this with us, but yeah, you are right

Isn't it widely known fact, though? Like that tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables? Or that spiders aren't insects?

I thought that people learn about taxonomy kingdoms in like 3rd grade, lol.

May work as a joke, but on the other hand, even plants are covered in multicellular micro-animals we cannot see with naked eye. Even water contains them. It is quite possible that nothing is technically vegan on this planet, apart from molten lava, maybe, so no one is technically vegan either xD

Education levels in the USA are sadly, Very poor.
What do you mean you can’t eat toadstools?

Where I live there's a whole tradition of gathering various species of fungi in forests to eat them. Many of these are tasting great, the cultivated mushrooms do not even compare. A lot of traditional cuisine dishes make use of them.

However, there are cases, each year, of people who took a poisonous fungus for edible one. This happens even to people who were gathering fungi for decades. There are species which give you diarrhea and make you vomit for day or two, but there are also ones which will totally destroy one's liver, leading to death, after eating just one. I think of them as a Polish equivalent of fugu fish, you can make mistake only once in a lifetime.

And it is a facinating species for me, they mainly live underneath the earth, communicate and interact with trees.

Gosh...if you're gonna be a daredevil...I would think that you would get more thrills for the price (the price being losing your life) by being a bungee jumper, skydiver, or wingsuit user, than by...eating a lousy fish, or eating a lousy mushroom!

Originally there were only considered to be two kingdoms of life. Every organism was either an animal or a plant. Colloquially it is still common for people to use this simple two kingdom classification of life with the possible exception of bacteria.

Yeah, fungi are now classified as their own kingdom. It's interesting how the understanding of life and lifeforms have changed over the centuries. Currently there are 7 kingdoms of life, 5 are eukaryotes and 2 prokaryotes.

As biologist Stephan Jay Gould wrote "an ecosystem just needs producers, and reducers". Plants produce, and fungi decay it all down so it can be reused. Animals, the middlemen, arent really needed. So all animals, including us, are just along for the ride.

I like to gather the wild ones I know are edible and don’t have toxic lookalikes.
I gather oyster, coral and morel.There is a false morel but it’s easy to tell the difference.Always slice your morels in half, a true morel stem will be completely hollow.

The plants would be nowhere near as successful if it weren't for animals which act as pollinators.

Well yes. There would be less diversity of plants. The ecosystem would be more boring and less diverse if some plants didnt bribe animals to do their bidding for them - by producing fruit, and or flowers.