Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines: 

Our Lifelong Relationship with Fungi

By Nicholas P. Money

Princeton University Press 2024

Nicholas Money is a professor of biology at Ohio’s Miami University, but readers of his fantastic new book Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines will finish the final page strongly suspecting he had a prior career as a science high school teacher, since he’s mastered that profession’s combination of vividly explaining scientific matters to a lay audience and liberally disgusting that audience for the sheer fun of it. 

Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines handles the vivid explaining with the sure-footed grace of a natural storyteller, and although it can scarcely avoid the disgusting parts, these pages convey the strong impression that Money would detour a country mile to get to those parts in any case. He tells his readers about the mechanics of yeast in the human gut, but he also wants to make sure those same readers never forget that they are involuntarily revolting colony creatures hosting vast populations of fungi. The reason is very simple: fungi grow wherever they can find food, and the human body, it turns out, is one big Denny’s buffet of calories (an average of one hundred thousand per body, Money helpfully supplies). The whole subject of mycology ends up being a tour of greasy all-you-can-eat larder-raiding, and humans are the larder, whether they want to be or not (hint: they don’t want to be). 

“Yeasts populate the skin and crowd around the hair follicles on the scalp; other species live in the ear canals, nasal passages, and mouth; and fungi swarm in the digestive and reproductive systems,” Money gleefully goes on. “At this moment, and throughout our lives, fungal cells are feeding on the scalp and growing in the gut, consuming the mucus and dead cells that we discharge every day …” It’s true that all this consuming is indispensable for controlling bacterial growth (among other things), but even if it were possible to stop this quite literally stomach-churning drama, our author assures us we shouldn’t do it. “No amount of grooming will leave us antifungal, which is a good thing because we would be in bad shape if we abolished our partners,” he writes. “A body without fungi would be as barren as a forest without mushrooms.”

And if you were thinking you’d take a bit of refuge from the creepy-crawlies breeding in their numberless generations on every inch of your skin by contemplating your beloved pet, alas, Money is way ahead of you:

Beyond the body, fungi inhabit our pets, are active in damp places in our homes, and flourish on fruits and vegetables in the kitchen. Pet dogs and cats are covered with yeasts, bathrooms are mycological playgrounds, and we consume fungi clinging to salad ingredients without giving them a second thought – until the tomatoes sprout hairs. 

Lovely.

And yet, in the way of those much-maligned high school science teachers (and who knows, perhaps the occasional college professor), Money wins over his readers even in the process of disgusting them. This book is everything any decent person would want to know about fungus, and by the time Money gets into full swing, even the most reluctant reader will want to know more. And the book ends by venturing far, far beyond Earth – specifically, to Kepler 1649c, an Earth-sized planet three hundred light years away. Naturally, not everything is known about this far-distant world, but Money knows one thing: “If Kepler 1649c is watery, it seems likely to harbor life, and if it accommodates anything more complicated than our bacteria, it is certain to be populated with fungi.” 

So this whole creeping, rubbery mess is galactically inevitable. Even after reading Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines, you might not be enthusiastic about that, but at least you’ll know that your astronaut descendants will be just as queasy as you are. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News