Economic Botany

Attitudes toward nature generally, and toward mushrooms more specifically, vary greatly from country to country and from people to people.Russians (Fig. 1) are among the most avid mushroom hunters in the world.When they settled the Chukotka peninsula during the Soviet era, they were delighted to find enormous expanses of tundra "where the mushrooms are taller than the trees" (Fig. 2) (the "trees" being dwarf birches).Yet they were amazed that the indigenous people there barely used them despite an absence of poisonous species.For some Siberian people, such as the Yupiit, mushrooms were a taboo food; for others, such as Chukchi reindeer herders (Fig. 3) wild mushrooms were considered "reindeer food" or "reindeer drugs" and thus unfit for human consumption (see article by Yamin-Pasternak on Beringia).

Cross-Cultural Comparisons