When I was a little girl, I was a pretty picky eater. My dad, being a disciplinarian type, used to try to force me to eat things I hated. One food that I’ve always really hated with a passion is mushrooms. But my hatred goes beyond merely not wanting to eat the little buggers. I don’t even like the sight or smell of mushrooms and you’d be hard pressed to get me to touch one.
I think this weird aversion to mushrooms came about when I was a toddler and our family lived in England. Our backyard was full of wild mushrooms, which thrived in England’s damp, cool climate. My parents told me that the mushrooms were poisonous and I should never touch or eat them. I was about three years old at the time and the mushrooms in our yard were HUGE. And I have three older sisters who were teenagers at the time; one of them was also quite an artist. To drive home that I shouldn’t play with the toadstools in our yard, she used to draw shark teeth on the mushrooms in my coloring books. Those that didn’t get the shark tooth cosmetic makeover got mean looking expressions drawn on their caps. One day, when my sister was feeling particularly mean-spirited, she enlisted another sister to pick some of the parasitic plants. They put them in a bag and had a great time chasing me around the yard, howling with laughter while I screamed and cried. It got so bad that I would actually freeze and start screaming if I so much as saw a mushroom close to me.
These days, my reaction to mushrooms are not like they used to be. For example, I no longer freak out if I see one in the yard and I don’t run away screaming if one is on my plate at dinner time. But I can’t eat them and I won’t willingly touch them. And I also hate the way they smell. Even though I know the phobia is irrational and weird, I just can’t get beyond it. At 35 years of age, I figure I’m pretty set in my ways and I doubt I’ll ever change, even though lots of people have told me that I don’t know what I’m missing.
Until a few years ago, I thought I was the only one who felt this way about mushrooms. Then one day in 2003, I saw a guest star on Montel Williams’ talk show who also hated mushrooms the same way I do. The show’s topic was on phobias and Montel was trying to help people get over them. The lady who happened to hate mushrooms the way I do was trembling and crying the way I used to when I was a little girl. Montel Williams said he would kiss her if she’d eat a raw mushroom that he had placed between his lips. He said he’d never before kissed anyone on his show, but he’d make an exception for her. To my great surprise, it worked. She actually took a mushroom from his lips and he kissed her. That never would have worked in my case. I don’t like kissing strange men.
A few months ago, I was tooling around on the Internet and I actually found out that my bizarre phobia has a name– Mycophobia— which according to Answers.com and a few other Web sites, is the fear of mushrooms. Holy smokes! There are enough people in the world who fear mushrooms that the phobia actually has a name! That knowledge somehow makes me feel a little less weird about my admittedly bizarre “affliction”.
I found a blog written by a someone named Keifus back in late May of this year. Keifus, who claims to be a 34 year old scientist, says that he found a colony of morels growing in the yard. Evidently, Keifus thinks morels are “lovely organisms”, but he (or she?) can’t stomach the idea of eating one. In fact, this person even writes of the irrational fear that edible mushrooms might still be deadly poisonous. I think I’ve mostly gotten over the “poison” fear. I think I just can’t get over the fact that mushrooms look really creepy. I’ve never thought of them as cute, even in classic Disney artistic forms, like on Fantasia. That scene with the dancing chanterelles, I’m sure, was supposed to be clever. But watching it still makes me want to run screaming from the room.
I know I have an unusual “problem”, if you can call it that. Generally, when I think of phobias, I think of major fears that cause big problems, like agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, or xenophobia, the fear of people. Being a mycophobe is hardly the end of the world. Shoot, all I have to do is avoid fungus. That means I would never be happy working on a mushroom farm. Actually, my hatred of all things mushroom did, in a way, affect my choice of careers. For awhile, I considered becoming a chef because I enjoy cooking. But then it occurred to me that I’d have to work with mushrooms if I were a chef. Who ever heard of a chef who hated mushrooms so much that they wouldn’t touch one?
Still, I can’t say that my phobia has really affected my life that much, and for that, I guess I can count myself lucky. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t occasionally crop up sometimes. Like, for instance, I was once invited to someone’s house for dinner and the main course was chock full of mushrooms. And I had to explain why I couldn’t even try it. Luckily, she got a kick out of the story and didn’t seem offended that I stuck with the side dishes. Besides, I had made a loaf of bread for her and she wasn’t a bread eater, so it worked out fine.
I guess I’m glad to know that I’m not alone in my hatred of all things fungus and my phobia actually has a name. Knowing that mushroom phobia can be called mycophobia makes me feel somewhat less ridiculous. Still, I sometimes feel annoyed that my sisters did their job too well, scaring me away from the poisonous toadstools in the yard!
