Ain't No Fun (If The Fungi Can't Have None)

More from the world of plungus.

Friend of the blog Max commented on the previous post, raised pertinent issues - and here I quote:

"In the world in which there are no psychedelic mushrooms, one could imagine more psychedelic plants or even animals filling that ecological niche. Like I could imagine some psychedelic nudibranchs somehow evolving.

Anyway taking this idea further, would this include yeasts? What happens to bread and beer?".

Also, I hate fungus - mold, ringworm, et cetera - learned to my dismay the other week that even leather can grow fungus - and so it brings me some joy to, even if merely in an imaginal realm, apply my latent fascist impulse to the total extermination of that blightsome kingdom of life.

So to start, something near and dear to my heart: beer.

Beer is produced by the brewing and fermentation of a starch source into a product containing ethanol and carbonation. In reality this fermentation is generally performed by yeast - fungal microorganisms.

This fermentation is not exclusive to yeast. Some bacteria can perform it - as in Auto-Brewery Syndrome -  as can some plants, even some fish!

Bacteria-wise, there's two possible branches: bacteria which conduct lactic acid fermentation, such as lactobacillus and so on, or this one bacteria I found on wikipedia which conducts fermentation similarly to yeast, Zymomonas Mobilis. In both cases you'd likely notice a difference in flavour of the beverage produced compared to yeast: a more sour taste in the former, and a rotten apple-y taste in the latter. In the former case you might find beverages like masato or kumis rising to popularity rather than beer.

If lactic acid fermenting bacteria becomes the way to produce beer, you might find common themes show up across cultures as to the origin of beer: produced from the gut or bladder of a fool maybe, or from some culture-hero woman's vagina.

The plants which perform fermentation are those which grow fruit (and the fermentation takes place in these fruits) or swamp plants, in their roots. The issue lies in macroorganisms not being able to distribute themselves through fermentable mash or other substrate quite so thoroughly as microorganisms. Perhaps over many hundreds or thousands of years people breed cultivars of plants with highly-fermented fruit, or plants with very fine and voluminous fermenting roots which grow atop vats of mash like lotus blossoms.

There's all this science bullshit about fish fermenting, but what I gathered is that a few species of carp can perform fermentation for energy in low-oxygen environments. Perhaps in a world or region wherein fish become the preferred source of alcohol people maintain deep and narrow pools stocked with carp fed on grains and fruit, periodically drained of some blood or butchered into something like endrunkening sushi or sashimi - cooking of course quickly removes alcohol, as anyone who's made coq au vin can attest.

And of course this is just what exists in reality as known currently - who knows how things may evolve in a world entirely without fungi.

Now for bread:

Bread rises due to yeast in the dough consuming sugars and digesting them into carbon dioxide and ethanol. The gluten structure of the bread retains the bubbles of carbon dioxide, allowing the whole mass to expand.

Unleavened bread is fine without yeast. So are pearlash or soda bread and sponge cake.

Are we then left with a world without nice fluffy fermentation-risen bread? Not necessarily. The same critters which can ferment beer can also ferment dough. Bacteria's probably the most feasible option, being like yeast a microorganism. This is likely to make all dough into sourdough, because of the byproducts of lacto-fermentation. Fish seem to me the least feasible - how are you going to wrap a fish in dough yet also give it access to enough water? I had a dream like this once. Though it would provide a nice combo of Christian imagery. Plants are sort of a middle ground, perhaps these fermentation-bred plants potted in a mass of dough, uprooted into another pot every few days so that the risen dough-soil can be baked.

Now for psychedelics:

From snoozling about some, it seems like the Science says that psychedelic mushrooms evolved and spread (sometimes through horizontal gene transfer) because their neurotransmitter-mimicking chemicals inhibited the appetites of flies, which often shared the mushrooms' cow-dung habitats. No one knows why ayahuasca evolved. Perhaps they're stupid, and Darwin is a bastard man? There's also psychdelic fish.

Maybe it's just a coincidence that magic mushrooms induce the effect they do in humans. Maybe it's beneficial to induce a more ecological mindset. Who can truly say but God.

Anyways, it's possible in this fungi-less fantasy world we're supposing that people entirely replace psychedelic mushrooms with psychedelic plants and animals, and perhaps there will evolve psychedelic organisms with effects on humans that are not coincidental, but intentional - rewriting the brains of those that imbibe them to the betterment of the imbibed's greater species-being.