A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
mycophile
A mycophile is someone who likes fungi: hunts them, eats them, photographs them, or simply notices them. The word is usually used at the scale of a culture rather than an individual. Russia, Poland, Ukraine, the Czech lands, Slovakia, Italy, Catalonia, Japan, Korea, and China are mycophile societies, where wild mushroom picking is an ordinary family activity that a large share of the population takes part in.
Etymology
The word is Greek for fungus-lover, and it was put into general circulation by Valentina Pavlovna Wasson and R. Gordon Wasson in the 1950s. She was Russian and picked mushrooms as a matter of course; he was American and was alarmed by it. They spent thirty years working out why two European-descended cultures could differ so completely on the same organisms, and coined the pair of terms to name the difference.
Notes
The split does not track climate, geography, or which mushrooms grow where. It tracks culture, and it is remarkably stable: the line between mycophile and mycophobic Europe runs roughly north to south and has stayed in about the same place for centuries.