Margate Mushroom Festival: ‘All mushrooms are magic’

Neither plant nor animal, but related to humans - if you want to go back a billion years or so - mushrooms are bonkers things.

While some fungus facts sound utterly bizarre, what is apparent is that mushrooms are small but mighty - what other thing could be a zombie, feed us, be good for the environment, get us high, and potentially alleviate illnesses and disease?

Darryn de la Soul is well versed in the magic of fungi, setting up Margate Mushrooms during Covid and evolving the business to support her work at Margate Independent Food Bank. 

Ahead of the CIC’s first Margate Mushroom Festival, Darryn offers up just a glimpse of just how strange things with fungi can get.  

Have mushrooms always been your favourite food?

I've always loved mushrooms but [Margate Mushrooms] is a lockdown project that's gone a bit bonkers.

I was one of the three million people who got no government help so I needed a side hustle - my main hustle is events. Weirdly, I saw a Facebook ad saying, learn how to grow mushrooms, and I thought, ‘yeah okay, I'll do that’, and that's how it started. 

I started growing in a spare room at home and in the same period of time, John Finnegan and I started Margate's Independent Food Bank; I put 20 and five together and got three and decided that we should do [the mushroom growing] as part of the food bank so it would become a revenue-generating arm of the food bank.

That's one of the big reasons why I'm doing this festival, besides the fact that I really want to do a mushroom festival. I want to be able to bolster the amount of free food we can give away over winter. There's so little funding available for food banks, we need to generate our own.

Did you know mushrooms’ virtues when you started growing them? 

Not really, no. But I've since done lots of training on the medicinal side of mushrooms and all the amazing benefits. One of the people speaking at the festival, Martin Powell, is a medicinal mushrooms guru. He’ll be speaking about the use of mushrooms in longevity and in having a good old age. I find it more and more engulfing; the whole brilliance of how humans and mushrooms are made for each other. The more I learn, the more I want to learn. It's such an interesting field.

How are you feeling about the festival?

I'm so excited. It's going to be amazing. We're going to have a mushroom market as well that's open with all kinds of mushroom-based people there. That's going to be open to everybody. MOP Margate are going to be doing lunches, we have a post-dinner DJ at Hoffs and loads of restaurants in town will be having a special mushroom dish for the weekend. It's going to be a town-wide event. 

Looking at the festival programme, what jumped out was that mushrooms have many purposes and functions and tap into many different fields. What were your considerations when putting the programme together, and is there an area that interests you the most?

My personal interest is in health and wellbeing because I use lion's mane every day. I use shiitake regularly when I'm run down or ill. I use cordyceps often. 

But when programming the festival, I wanted it to be very broad so that we could appeal to everybody from different angles. We've got foraging to cooking, via ageing, via the use of psychedelics in Africa. The amazing Darren Le Baron is in South Africa at the moment, discovering more about how [mushrooms have] been used for centuries. He's a really big proponent of the use of psychedelics, not just for fun but for functional use in healing. 

I’ve heard of mushrooms in terms of foraging and health, but I’ve never heard of their cultural significance in Africa. Could you tell me a little bit more about that? 

Well, I don't really know, this is what we're going to find out from Darren. But I come from South Africa and I studied archaeology. I remember specifically being taught about the experience of the San; that when they would do these dances they would have this experience of energy boiling inside them and then shooting out the back of their neck.

At the time I understood that as something that came out of this physical endeavor of dancing and dancing and dancing. But it seems that they have been using mushrooms or other plants to help with this process. And it’s in these out-of-body experiences where they interact with the animals they're going to hunt.

What are you looking forward to most at the festival?

I'm a little bit keen for the cooking demo with Craig Mathers from Kebbell’s restaurant in Broadstairs because he's been doing some wonderful things with our mushrooms on their menu for a long time. And I'm a lazy cook, so for me to find some really good inspiration for cooking better with my own mushrooms.

What is your go-to mushroom dish at home?

Just mushrooms on toast - there’s nothing better. Mushrooms, garlic, toast, good bread, it’s just the best.

And you said that you take lion’s mane regularly and shiitake when you're feeling rough. Could you tell me some of their benefits?

Absolutely. So lion's mane is incredibly good for focus;* to be able to finish one email before you start the next one and resist the temptations of multitasking when actually you just need to complete a task. I have lots of adult ADHD clients who swear by it. It's also been used in Chinese medicine for centuries for gut problems, like gastritis. 

And then shiitake, I use when I'm run down because it's an incredibly good immune boost. Especially if I'm starting to get a cold, it's an excellent antiviral preparation.I use it alongside a standard cold and flu remedy. The combination of the two is extremely beneficial, especially now coming up to winter. 

What's the property?

It's got a special thing called Lentinan, which is its superpower.

And what’s lion’s mane’s superpower? 

It stimulates nerve growth factor in your brain. [Mushrooms and humans are] so close - the last evolutionary split between animals and something else was between animals and fungi - so we have a common ancestor. That’s why we have such an affinity with fungus and fungi.

What do you mean by affinity?

It means that we've got lots of receptors for fungi and we've got lots of things that interact with our immune system. That is why lion's mane is so good for things like mild cognitive impairments in the elderly.** [Scientists] are looking at lion’s mane as something to use in dementia drugs, because it has this interaction with our immune system. 

Most mushrooms also contain something called ergothioneine. We have ergothioneine receptors all over our bodies, in our eyes, in our liver - literally our body is full of them. We should be getting ergothioneine through the food chain. It should be coming from fungus in the soil, which goes into the plants. We eat the plants, we get ergothioneine. The plants get eaten by the animals, we eat the animals, we should get the ergothioneine. 

But because of farming practices where pesticides are used at every step of the way, and most pesticides are fungicides; we kill off the fungus in the soil, we kill off the fungus during storage, we kill off the fungus everywhere. And the only way to get it is by eating mushrooms. It is very important in exercise, in recovery, in energy production.

Is this ergothioneine just in lion’s mane or in all mushrooms?

It’s in all mushrooms. In fact, shiitake has more than many other mushrooms, but all mushrooms have it.

There must be a quality difference between your mushroom and the ones you get at Tesco. Do you still find ergothioneine in shop-bought mushrooms? 

As much as I want everybody to buy my nice expensive fancy mushrooms, the white button mushrooms for Tescos are still packed with medicinal benefits. In fact, one of the best mushrooms to prevent and to fight breast cancer with, is white button mushrooms from Sainsbury's.***

Really?

Yeah. Isn't that amazing? I don't want to put anybody off buying my lion's mane, but white button mushrooms, seriously, they're gonna help you. I always say to people, please do buy our amazing mushrooms, but in between buy mushrooms anyway, eat mushrooms.

You've blown my mind. What is the most interesting fact about mushrooms that you have learnt?

Well, breast cancer and white button mushrooms, is definitely one of them. The other one, which is a fun fact, is cordyceps. Cordyceps' superpower is endurance - especially for men in certain circumstances.

But cordyceps are the zombie mushroom. Around Tibet, areas make their entire living from harvesting these mushrooms in the wild. The mushrooms take over an insect's brain. They eat out the brain and occupy the insect's body and basically get the insect to move them around. That's how they move. It's completely mental. But in the UK, the ones that we supply, they're vegan. They live on brown rice.

Do you have a favourite mushroom in general or is there one you have a soft spot for? 

It was the lion's mane, but it's now the cordyceps, now that I've seen how they grow. They’re these incredible bright orange fingers and they're so beautiful. They've definitely become my favourite. They have such a great effect on me when I need some extra energy.

You must get this quite a lot, but do you trade in magic mushrooms or will they have a presence at the festival in some way?

No. They are illegal. They will definitely not be for sale… But all mushrooms are magic!

You've kind of convinced me that they are.

They really are, and that's now my standard reply to anybody who asks for magic mushrooms. We just can't do it. We're a CIC. We're a food bank. We can't sell illegal things.

However, there is a campaign called Psilocybin Access Rights. They will be at the festival with their petition trying to change the status of psilocybin. In the panel discussion, we will be talking to Heroic Hearts who do therapeutic work with magic mushrooms with people suffering from PTSD. Their work is amazing, and PAR are keen to reclassify psilocybin and allow it for use in therapeutic situations and in medical health applications.

It sounds like you've got every mushroom base covered in this festival.

DLS : Yeah, we're trying to!

Margate Mushroom Festival is on October 18-19 at ARK Cliftonville. Day and weekend passes are available, or you can buy tickets for individual events. For more information and programming visit margatemushrooms.co.uk.

*Medical News Today reports that some research indicates lion’s mane may improve some symptoms associated with ADHD, but there is a lack of evidence to support these claims.

**A 2024 study found that preliminary research indicated that H.erinaceus (one of the properties contained in lion’s mane) supplements improved the scores of mild cognitive impairments in adults aged 50-80 years old, and shows promise in improving cognitive function and mood. The same study noted that the medicinal properties of H.erinaceus includes antioxidants, anticancer and antimicrobial. 

***Cancer Research UK states that there is not enough evidence to say any mushroom can prevent or cure cancer. While not breast cancer, a recent study found that white button mushrooms may reduce immune suppression and enhance anti-cancer immune responses in prostate cancer patients, reports European Medical Journal.