Mushrooms: coming soon to a burger near you

I started putting a tablespoon in my bowls of soups and stews. I liked the taste enough to keep putting on more until I put in a cup or two to the whole stew.

The common commercial white and brown button/portobello mushrooms (Agaricus campestris and Agaricus bisporus) are pretty easy to grow -- they've been cultivated at scale since the 1700s.

Others (such as oyster mushrooms and shiitake) aren't too much harder.

Unfortunately, the most prized species (truffles, morels) are more tricky. Commercial truffle cultivation does exist, but it's a roll of the dice. You inoculate your trees, then you pray. It's nothing like the large-scale factory model used for the Agaricus species.

With respect to morels, while several people over the years have claimed to have a process for cultivating them, no one (to my knowledge) has ever been successful at producing them on a commercial scale.

Virtually all morels are still harvested in the wild. That's a real pity, because they are worlds better than the Agaricus species.

And not having calories might be a good thing, but it doesn't make a food "nutritious".

Fats are calorie-dense, which is their primary danger (ignoring trans-fats here).

Simple carbs give you plenty of calories too, and basically nothing else.

People are quick to demonize all carbs, but it's only really the simple ones that are dangerous.

Whole carbs are generally fine in moderation, like everything else.

A lot of people are looking for foods they can binge on, with no guilty conscience, but no such food exists. It's not black/white, good/bad.

The media feeds into to this, with the "fat bad carbs good fat good carbs bad protein superfood eat this don't eat that eat that don't eat this" nonsense.

Eat a varied diet, avoid added sugars and fats. Boom, 90% done.

But there has been a tendency to demonize all carbs, just like there was demonization of fats in earlier decades. Both are wrong.

And no, I don't believe the "inflammatory waste products" theory, that's only one step removed from detox nonsense.

Word of mouth ideas about cause and effect, learned though informal testing in the gym rather than the lab. That's not to say there is widespread agreement about any/all of it. The contentious ideas are most likely to be called bro science. e.g. Google "brosplits."

As a rule of thumb, anytime 'bro' is used as a slight on hackernews, it's being used wrong (differently than anyone outside the computer nerd cirlce of the valley bubble uses it). I trash on bro science now and them, but the carbs thing was more of a society-wide meme that hit it's peak with the Atkins diet.