Gro pro: How India is making room for new kinds of shrooms

Why aren’t we eating more mushrooms? We already know they taste good – we’ve devoured porcini puffs, gucchi biryani, enoki bibimbap and quattro-fungi pizza at trendy restaurants. We know they’re nutritious too – all fibre, no fat, packed with Vitamin D. They’re easy to grow – they spring from sawdust, dead logs, straw, coffee grounds, even cardboard sheets. They’re sustainable – they require less water, energy, and land than vegetable crops. They’re literally a precious asset – earlier this year, researchers at Goa University published research on how they synthesised gold nanoparticles from roen olmi, a wild, local mushroom variety.