I just want to say thanks to the people who look at these kinds of things and think “I should probably check if this is delicious”, because I would never acquire that information otherwise
I have a morbid dark humor, semi-serious theory that toddlers put everything in their mouth as an evolutionary poison testing system. You find out what is and isn’t deadly poison, and you can always make more toddlers.
In the past people check if birds or other animals can eat it, and it’s a safe bet we could if they could
Narrator: it was far from a safe bet
Sounds like the sort of thing someone infected by brain fungus would say.
more spores = better than
I BROUGHT YOU THIS DELICIOUS ELOTE PLEASE YOU MUST TRY IT
You will eat the corn fungus and enjoy it.
Sí
Now I want to try it.
I’ve always heard it’s very good. I’ve never had a chance to try it. I used to be grossed out by the idea but I’ve sense embraced the zen of just eating anything that isn’t actively poisonous because life is short and food is delicious.
It’s not too great. Mix of sour and musty you try to drown in a lot of salsa. Or maybe the street vendors I bought it from didn’t use fresh stuff idk
I need this mushroom now. Mexican food an mushrooms are my fucking jam for cooking.
Who need they fungussy ate
well when you say it like that…
What a delectable yeast infection
Corn smut!
i learned about huitlacoche in a plant disease class like a decade ago when learning about fungal disease cycles. still haven’t had the opportunity to try it, but i would.
even ignoring the ethics, its far less weird, biologically, than feeding corn to ruminants and eating the products of that. it’s using a living corn stalk as a substrate to cultivate fungal fruiting bodies. fungus are very efficient at turning complex structures into simple bioavailable nutrients.
you would know this instinctively if you had ҽαƚҽɳ ƚԋҽ ƚҽōɳαɳāƈαƚʅ αɳԃ ƚαʂƚҽԃ ιƚʂ ɱყʂƚҽɾιҽʂ
You will eat the corn smut
the one kind of smut I’m for
If I can imma order some at work to play with. This is genuinely exciting to me.
This fungus-filled tumor is delicious.
Haha.
-–
The situation reminds me of a burl which is a tumor-like growth on trees. Burl wood can be beautiful. Here’s a guitar as an example…
Burlwood is so gorgeous. And since you can get a potentially giant round lump of wood you can do things with it you can’t do anywhere else. Burls, and their enormous potential economic value in the deeply weird society, are a big plot point in one of Niven’s Ringworld books.
Lmao what? I’m going to have to read more of those
I’m not sure if it’s the first or second one, but the characters had a whole neat idea about what you could do with a burl in the ring.
My first instinct is that this is disgusting but the part of my brain that cares about facts & logic says that it’s just a fungus. We eat plenty of those. Pretty sure there’s also plenty of parasitic fungi we eat regularly.
As a food nerd cause it’s my job, 2024 is my Year of the Mushroom. Fungi are my favorite variety of food and there’s so many kinds and they’re all super versatile. Like, imagine a gravy made from these bad boys
So which parasitic fungi do we eat regularly?
This one apparently. First I’ve heard of.
Get this smut out of here! Volcel vanguard!
There’s a place near me that serves this, and I’ve always wanted to try it. The place is so expensive though.
Delicious plant body horror.
who tf found that shit and thought to themselves “I wonder what that fungus tumor tastes like?”
It’s just a mushroom. A fungal fruiting body.
You shouldn’t eat amanitas and you definitely shouldn’t eat Destroying Angel, the most metal of all fungi.
If you carefully learn what you are doing, there are many very delicious amanitas. I am particularly fond of amanita calyptoderma (cocorra) though I more frequently eat amanita vaginata (grissettes). the vaginata complex is fairly easy to id, though a. calyptoderma, a. Velosa and others that can be mistaken for the deadly amanitas you obviously should be much more careful about. I guess my advice would be learn what you are doing first, and learn to id all poisonous mushrooms in your area as well.
TIL. I’m hoping to have a garden up and running this year with corn in it, maybe I’ll get to try this.
and I kinda wanna give this a try.
I’m vegan and a cook and will be seeing if I can order some on my boss’s dime to play with. I’ll be posting reports if I can make it happen. This is a very interesting food to me.