To globalisation! The cause of... and solution to... all of life's problems

A pair of clever mycologists are discovering new species of Boletus without venturing farther than their supermarket. All thanks to Market Forces, and DNA sequencing technology, and life-style aspirations signified by up-market culinary ingredients, and the willingness of corporate supply-chains to outsource everything to the cheapest origin - which in the case of dried mushroom packets, was forest foragers in China.

So the contents of the packets were not Boletus edulis stricto sensu as claimed, but previously-undocumented varieties (though if there is any shortcoming in flavour, it misses the attention of most customers). Even in feckin Italy, Asian mock-porcini outsells real porcini:

Porcini are estimated to have an annual worldwide consumption up to 100,000 metric tons (Hall et al., 1998). However, their harvest is restricted to wild foraging since, to date, their cultivation has failed. The high prices for this wild food foraged locally in Europe and North America has driven the market towards less costly sources, such as China (Sitta & Floriani, 2008). According to the official website of Yunnan Province (www.yunnan.cn), the major exporter of wild mushrooms in China, locally-sourced porcini have been exported to Europe since 1973, and mushrooms of Chinese origin now account for approximately half of all dried porcini in Italy (Sitta & Floriani, 2008). The Chinese species of porcini have been shown previously to be more closely related to European Boletus aereus than they are to the core commercial species, B. edulis

An analogy could be drawn between fungal mycelia and human trade routes, though I am not the first to draw it.

Figure 2: Experimental setup. Globe covered with agar gel is colonised by slime mould P. polycephalum. Oat flakes represent areas of U.

This opens up new vistas and prospects in the exploration of biodiversity. Here at the Riddled Institute of Dumpster Foraging we are industriously DNA-sequencing packets of imported surimi to identify new species of deep-sea angler-fish and giant squid.

We also await the descriptions of previously- and subsequently-unknown sub-species of orangutan, from DNA found in Indonesian-sourced PKE (palm-kernel-extract) dairy fodder.