The Greatest Con in Mushroom History, Secret Weapon: Normal Dogs, a Bee's Benis

In 1925, a mycologist named Lambert was walking through his mushroom cultivation area in Pennsylvania when he spotted a single freakish mutant: a chalky white mushroom growing among the usual pale grayish-brown ones. He took spawn from it, grew it out, and called the resulting strain "Snow White." By 1933, it was the leading commercial mushroom in the United States. Today, roughly 90 percent of all mushrooms eaten in the US—and a majority in much of the Western world—are the same species, Agaricus bisporus. The little white button, the brown cremini, and the big portobello are all the same fungus, just harvested at different ages and, crucially, marketed under different names. The white buttons are all clones of that one 1925 mutant. The brown cremini is closer to the original wild form. And the portobello? That is an overgrown brown cremini that someone in the 1980s rebranded so successfully that nobody knows who actually did it.

The Great Portobello Con