Mushroom high: Why we can’t get enough of the ‘sunny sponges’

There is an evocative and eerily brilliant poem by Sylvia Plath describing the growth of mushrooms: how their “Soft fists insist on/ Heaving the needles”. “We shall by morning/ Inherit the earth”, it concludes. How prescient it has proved.

Fast forward from 1959 to 2020 and sales of mushrooms are outstripping those of every other vegetable, as people grasp at anything and everything that might increase their capacity to resist and recover from Covid 19. In the case of mushrooms – sales of which are up 18 per cent in Sainsbury’s and 10 per cent in Tesco – this impulse is not entirely unfounded: mushrooms are a good source of vitamin D, and though its primary role is in bone and muscle health there have been reports that the vitamin can play a role in resistance to this virus.

There is not enough evidence, UK health bodies NICE and NHS believe, to determine a causal relationship between the vitamin and the virus, but what is indisputable is that thanks to lockdowns and self-isolation, many of us have been spending more time indoors than ever before; and that this will have an impact on our body’s ability to manufacture what is known as “the sunshine vitamin”, on account of the sunshine’s ability to stimulate vitamin D production in the skin.