i recently read the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins by left-wing anthropologist anna tsing, which i highly recommend. very hard to summarise, but begins with an exploration of matsutake mushrooms and how incredibly weird they are, and uses this as a launching pad into discussions of complex systems of interdependency and disturbance, commodity fetishism and the interplay of different systems of value at the edges of capitalist spheres, the people involved at the various stages of the chain and thier lives at the edges of capitalism, forest management (particularly the fascinating japanese concept of the satoyama peasant forest for human cohabitation with nature), and a whole bunch of other stuff.

anyway relevant to this thread is that mushrooms are way weirder than we think, and matsutake mushrooms are one of the weirdest of a weird bunch that nobody has been able to cultivate, and which mostly only really grow in human-disturbed forests, and that theres a huge interplay within the fungal body itself and with the other organisms in their environment (including humans). like the fungal body mates with other parts of itself and transfers parts of its dna to itself because its dna varies across the fungal body which is impossible to really characterise as a single organism, and also has complex interdependencies with various species of trees, and the whole thing is like a vast network thats just constantly in flux. i may have got some details wrong, but anyway very cool