On her typical walk in the woods in Newton, Massachusetts, something stopped Maria Pinto in her tracks. She spotted what appeared to be a glowing yellow figure with a metallic sheen among the pine needles on the ground. It was the first time Pinto was enthralled by a mushroom – the American yellow fly agaric, a poisonous fungus that is relatively common where Pinto lives in Massachusetts.

“It forced me down on my knees to examine it further, because it didn’t look real,” Pinto, a naturalist and writer, said. “It looked like it was from another dimension.” On that day in 2013, she captured the mushroom from dozens of angles on her phone.

More than a decade later, Pinto has dedicated much of her life to mycology, the burgeoning study of fungi. As a Jamaican American woman, Pinto stands apart in the mostly white hobby through her pursuit of exploring the African diaspora’s connection to mushrooms. In her recent book, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival, Pinto interviewed Black people who are growing and documenting mushrooms throughout the Americas.

Mycology has flourished in recent years, with citizen scientists, or amateur researchers, often leading the way in identifying new species owing to the small number of professional mycologists. Only about 5% of an estimated 3m species of fungi on Earth have been described, leaving a wealth of discovery for the curious. The study of fungi – including molds, yeast and mushrooms – is still relatively new; fungi wasn’t recognized as a distinct kingdom in biology until 1969. Pinto, Elan Hagens in Oregon and William Padilla-Brown in central Pennsylvania are a few Black mushroom enthusiasts contributing to the understanding of fungi and humans’ connection to them.

“We exist, but in isolation around the country,” Pinto said about Black mushroom lovers. “I think there are definitely efforts to mitigate that, or to actually get us together, but not a really concerted one.”

Fungi are essential to ecology. They act as decomposers, and without them, the earth would be filled with dead trees and animals. Mycorrhizal fungi, which grow in the soil, supply plants with additional nutrients and water. The organisms also have a storied role in African diasporic history and culture. Prior to the outlawing of slavery in the US, Africans who were escaping enslavement would consume an underground fungus to sustain themselves. Hagens, an ecologist, artist and forager, said that mushrooms have helped tether her to the land and forced her to slow down: “Being able to access wild foods and to provide food for yourself is a part of empowerment.”

‘We’re out here’

Pinto became interested in mushrooms by accident. As a self-identified “swamp rat; a little feral child”, growing up in Jamaica and south Florida, she loved to pick fresh food from the ground and off of trees. A few years after her run-in with the yellow mushroom in 2013, there was a mushroom boom in the north-east US following heavy rain. The abundance of mushrooms – the fruiting body of some fungi – in the fall of 2017 reminded Pinto about her love for foraging wild food.

“The minute you realize how little we know about mushrooms and how important they are in ecosystems, and how important they are to the evolution of a lot of life on Earth,” Pinto, 41, said, “I don’t think it’s really possible as a truly curious person to be like: ‘I’m just going to leave that one alone.’”

A friend of Pinto’s who grew up foraging for mushrooms in Poland taught her the basics of identifying and cataloguing fungi. Pinto’s social media posts were soon filled with pictures of mushrooms she’d foraged, leading the University of North Carolina Press to approach her to write a book about fungi.

“I wanted there to be a document for Black people from various diasporic communities to be able to reach for and perhaps see themselves in,” Pinto said. “When I started in the hobby, no such book existed. I wanted to bring jerked hen-of-the-woods jerky to more people – to let folks know we’re out here.”

In her book, Pinto wrote about self-emancipated formerly enslaved people who consumed Wolfiporia, a fungus that produces an underground source of nutrients that resemble a small coconut. The organism uses the ball of nutrients to sustain itself during drought and cold seasons. Native Americans would help the formerly enslaved people find and dig up the underground food source.

“In these moments of being on the run and not wanting to make smoke or any indication that you’re hiding away,” Pinto said, “this nutrient store underground, especially in the wintertime, was probably an incredible food.” The fungi is still used in traditional Chinese medicine to promote calmness and to enhance digestion.

Over the course of her research, Pinto learned about other Black figures throughout history who have contributed to mycology. Thelma Perry, a US Forest Service microbiologist, discovered a fungus on beetles that contributed to the devastation of pine trees. George Washington Carver, known for developing hundreds of uses for the peanut, was also a mycologist who collected and studied more than a thousand fungal specimens to help farmers mitigate crop diseases. He also helped compile a list of mushrooms of Alabama.

‘Think outside the box’

Hagens’ interest in mushrooms began when she was a young child growing up in the Portland area, where she attended environmental and nature-based classes starting in elementary school. Her love for fungi grew when she became a dog trainer in her mid-20s, after she participated in a CBS reality television show called Greatest American Dog in 2008. Though she didn’t win the $250,000 promised for the owner of the best-trained dog, Hagens learned during her time on the show that dogs could be trained to locate the odoriferous underground fungi, truffles. “This whole boom of truffles in Oregon and the United States was at its infancy,” Hagens, 41, said.

In 2011, she created her company, Temptress Truffles, to sell truffles found by her dogs and other foragers. She also used to train other people’s dogs to find truffles, but has pivoted her business to focus on hosting workshops on mushroom cultivation and identification.

In her decades of foraging for mushrooms, one spring day in 2020 stands out the most. While walking her dog alongside a river in the Portland metropolitan area, she spotted a large oyster mushroom twice the size of her face. The fan-shaped fungi with sprawling gills rested high up on a tree several meters away. “People were walking and jogging in front of me, and nobody is seeing this mushroom,” Hagens said. “It’s like the biggest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m flipping out.” It began raining, so Hagens returned in the evening to remove the mushroom with a knife fastened to a long stick. She cut out the parts infested with worms and made the rest into potstickers that she ate for days.

Hagens wants others to find the same joy and wonderment she does in foraging for wild edibles by simply stepping outside of their homes. About five years ago, she hosted a guided mushroom walk for Black, Indigenous and people of color at a plant medicine conference in Oregon. Some of the 30 participants had never been on a hike before. The group was in awe of sulphur tuft mushrooms, which emit a faint light to draw insects that help disperse their spores, and glow under UV light. “That’s something that people love to see, because it’s more than just: ‘Oh, that’s a poisonous mushroom,’ or: ‘That’s an edible mushroom,’” Hagens said. “It’s something that makes them think outside the box.”

Hagens tries to work with other Black ecologists when she can, such as Padilla-Brown, founder of MycoFest, an annual festival in central Pennsylvania. In 2024, she was a MycoFest keynote speaker about the intersection of fungi and animals; one of her discussion topics focused on sexually transmitted fungal infections.

“I don’t even know that many Black mycologists,” Padilla-Brown said. “I’m just waiting for more folks to show up for real. Because if they show up, then I invite them to come talk at my event … if they’re there, I’m hiring them.”

An ecological researcher and permaculture designer, Padilla-Brown started MycoFest in 2015 to increase the public’s understanding of ecology in the mid-Atlantic. The three-day festival features talks from expert foragers and scientists from around the nation, guided walks, camping, live music and childcare. Scientists are also on site to provide fungal identification using DNA technology. This year’s event will be held from 31 July to 2 August on the grounds of Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary in Artemas, Pennsylvania.

The same year as the festival, Padilla-Brown launched his company MycoSymbiotics, where he cultivates a variety of fungi such as cordyceps and creates extracts to help people manage ailments. A self-taught mycologist who learned from books and mentors, the 31-year-old initially became interested in fungi after taking magic mushrooms as a teenager. Then, at 17, he got arrested for possession with the intent to manufacture cannabis. After having a child a couple of years later, Padilla-Brown turned to legal avenues of pursuing his passions to support his family. He began growing gourmet mushrooms such as lion’s mane and maitake and hosting fungi cultivation workshops.

Now his business has expanded: he’s renovating a retail storefront and just completed a documentary about the culture around truffles. He and a team recently launched an agricultural cooperative called MycoSymbiotics Cooperative where members sell their fungi products. He also recently received a $26,000, two-year grant from the US Department of Agriculture to study the potential for native truffle cultivation in the north-east US.

Padilla-Brown is also focused on foraging local mushrooms and conducting tests on new varieties that he’s breeding. “I’ll be freezing them all in the final preservation here to preserve sensitive organisms into the future,” Padilla-Brown said. “I just want to hold on to them. It’s like a modern Noah’s ark kind of vibe.”

‘Nothing left to do but fruit’

Mycelium, the root-like structure of fungi that branches underground, connects trees and plants with vital nutrients. Just as that sprawling network acts as a unifying force, it’s also helped Black mycologists deepen ties to their communities and their understanding of themselves.

In one chapter of Pinto’s book, she writes about how mushrooms feel like kin. In her exploration of the Jamaican patois term “junjo”, meaning fungus, and the Haitian creole word “djon djon”, meaning black edible mushrooms, she concludes that Black Caribbeans have long foraged for and eaten mushrooms. The Butiko (meaning mushroom) clan in Uganda use mushrooms as their symbol and incorporate fungi into their origin story. These discoveries helped her see the long ties between fungi and African diasporic history and culture.

“The more I learn about the ancient origins and tantalizing futurity of fungi, about their centrality to healthy ecosystems and their adaptability, about their potential for earthly and mental remediation, the more I’ve realized that my kinship lines feel more mycelial than tree-like,” Pinto wrote in her book introduction.

“Like fungi, the stuff I’m made of (that we’re all made of) has the power to move in darkness, to thrive undetected, to quietly work until such a time as there’s nothing left to do but fruit.”