India could become a 'mushroom superpower' | Hacker News Reader

India could become a 'mushroom superpower'

bbc.com

59 pointsakbarnama29 comments

Title for both this post and that of the article ('How India could..') is misleading.

The article is just narrating handful of stories on how people are growing mushrooms, India is at 2% vs China at 75% of production share, etc.

Nothing about how India can increase its production to match that of China's.

Was that production share? I assumed consumption

China is growing mushrooms on boats in shipping containers perfectly timed to grow by the time they make it to maker. India is not catching up to that anytime soon.

Do you have more information about this? Searching for it only got shipping containers being retrofitted for growing them on land.

More or less this https://www.inquirer.com/business/kennet-square-mushroom-far...

This may be a stupid question, but is growing mushrooms in bedrooms safe?

It would make sense to me that mushroom growing medium is perfect for less healthy fungus to grow as well.

Depends on the type of mushroom and cultivation method. You need to be careful with a sterilised environment. You need air filtering.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/820538/ is an issue, for example. So is general contamination. This seems like a terrible idea.

Not to say that growing mushrooms at home is risk-free, but that paper is about industrial production.

Emphases mine: [0]

"Several persons concerned with the cultivation and industrial production of this mushroom fell ill, after close contact with it over a period of some months, with exhaustion, headache, chills and fever, and cough."

[0] (no snark intended - just pointing out potential differences from home cultivation)

yeah, but no one is tracking home growers. the issue is spore germination in lungs or allergic hypersensitivity which will be due to exposure.

I used to grow mushrooms at home, and worse, oyster mushrooms, and developed a persistent cough even for my relative low volume. it cleared up when I got rid of them, but you know, the area was just covered, covered in spores.

usually unsafe, as they drop a lot of spores

Would a good Air purifier help?

The concern isn't contamination of the medium -- you pasteurize the medium and use enough spawn so that your preferred mushroom mycelium outcompetes other fungi and bacteria. This intentionally happens fairly rapidly (because if it doesn't, you're very likely to get some form of bacterial or fungal contamination, which usually means tossing that chunk of medium). Once the mycelium have colonized the medium, it's fairly resistant to contamination in the same way that a healthy sourdough starter is resistant to contamination.

The main health concern is over spore production and inhalation of spores. If you're growing in a household environment you'll want to use a growing chamber with filtered air exchange.

What ever happened to India world superpower 2020?

India consistently disappoints the most optimists and the pessimists about its potential.

All the smart people left.

Interesting, one of my friends started his own mushroom-growing business called Nuvedo (https://nuvedo.com/). And from reading their blog https://nuvedo.com/blog/ I learned that mushrooms are some kind of superfood (similar to how the west sees acai or kale?).

Mushrooms probably wouldn't make too much of India's exports though, so remains to be seen how much of a superpower they could become.

Mushrooms become a Superfood if you set them in direct sunlight for an afternoon, preferably gilles side up, to let them produce Vitamin D at large quantities.

I should start growing my own mushrooms given that I eat them nearly every day.

Why stop there? Why rely on any specialized labor to for your consumables? Raise your own farm animals, make your own clothes, treat yourself at home using webmd.

It's a fun little inexpensive hobby to get into if you find fungi fascinating. Oyster mushrooms in particular are very easy to grow.

I've got a copy of Mycelium Running with instructions, and I don't think it's included in the long list of no no's for my apartment.

I hope so. It's such an efficient source of food.

Short shelf life. Hard to grow. Prone, ironically, to decomposition. Genetics are tricky. Specialized skillsets and knowledge and equipment often necessary for cultivation. Is it more efficient than raising tasty beef? Sure. Does it still taste great? Oh yes. Is it efficient? I guess it depends on what kind of efficiency you're aiming for. I've grown oyster mushrooms multiple times before at home, and it can be difficult, rewarding, frustrating, and fun. YMMV.

By what metric? Aren't they pretty deficient in nutrition? Like you'd need to eat several kilos to get 2000 calories.

(relatively) high protein content?

The mushrooms in question have (roughly) 2.24g of protein per 100g[0]. Recommended daily protein for an adult man is 54g [1]. That leaves you needing to eat 2.4 kg of mushrooms every day just to achieve the protein requirements.

As a comparison, you can achieve the same protein with 450g of egg[2] or tofu[3], or 200g of beef[4].

[0] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/169242/n... [1] https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2021-0... [2] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/748967/n... [3] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/174291/n... [4] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/746758/n...

You're comparing raw mushrooms to cooked, lean beef and appear to have cherry picked the lower protein common variety of tofu (instead of the higher protein calcium set variety which is equally common or much more common where I live).

If I use similarly misleading choices from the same dataset I could 'support' beef being lower protein than tofu by comparing cooked calcium set tofu to raw fatty mince. Or similarly, dried mushrooms would only require 600g or so (whilst also covering most of your energy needs).

At 4-6ish % by mass when cooked, mushrooms are decent, but not really higher than most plant sources.

Great source of many micronutrients though and complement tofu/beans well.

Calories per ton of CO2.

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