“We all have ways of eating our lovers. I like mine over rice with vegetables and a hint of balsamic vinegar.”

That’s how Kathryn Harlan opens her short story “Fruiting Bodies,” in the book by the same name. A pair of lovers explore their romance in a decidedly unique way: One grows mushrooms all over her body for the other to cook into delectable dishes. Swiss brown mushrooms over pasta. Button mushrooms with zucchini and carrots. In “Fruiting Bodies,” mushrooms nurture—they foster connection. The fact that the main character grows death caps behind her knees and truffles on her chest isn’t body horror—it’s romance—and it signals a cultural shift. For centuries, we’ve treated fungi with fear and disdain. Now they carry very different connotations: connection, transcendence, resistance. Even hope.

My mushroom fascination started with wonder. The first fungus I foraged was a hen of the woods, when I was a homesick graduate student living in New York City for the first time. I ventured out of Manhattan with a group of mycophiles for a class project. The loamy aroma of the New Jersey forest reminded me of my home state, Oregon, and I delighted in the bizarre shapes and colors of the mushrooms popping up through rotting leaves. A photo from the day shows me in a raincoat, beaming, my arms overflowing with a white fungus’s frills.

I was hooked. I hung giant botanical prints of fungi around my apartment and devoured information on the “zombie fungus” (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis), macabre mushrooms that take over the bodies of insects. I traveled upstate to meet amateur mycologists and forage, taking photo after photo of my finds. Once, a date asked me what I focused on in my work. When I said “mushrooms,” he gave me a long stare and then busted out in laughter. I recounted the experience to a friend. “You can’t bring that up on first dates!” she said, chastising me.

Mushrooms have attracted our curiosity for the very reasons that they repulsed people for centuries. They crop up amid death and rot, and thrive amid human disturbance, from clearcuts to oil slicks to wildfire burns.

At some point in the past four years, I noticed my newfound enthusiasm was part of a larger cultural trend. My fungi fascination started earning me social cachet. Friends began complimenting my artwork and asking me if I could teach them to forage. When I described my chanterelle lasagna, a new acquaintance practically swooned.

Something had shifted. Throughout popular culture, mushrooms were springing up like, well, mushrooms. Fungi cropped up in home decor and at New York Fashion Week in 2021. Enrollment in mycology courses was on the rise (as were mushroom-related calls to US poison-control centers). They appeared on Netflix in Have a Good Trip and Fantastic Fungi, and in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s best-selling novel Mexican Gothic.

For much of Western history, at least among Anglo-Saxon cultures, mushrooms were seen as dirty and vile—partly because of their potential to cause illness but also because they were gathered and eaten by maligned social groups. In the 1633 book The Diet of the Diseased, puritan physician James Hart wrote that the French ate “the excrements of the earth, the slime and scum of the water, the superfluity of the woods, and putrefaction of the sea; to wit, on frogs, snails, mushrooms, and oysters.” In Christopher Marlowe’s famously antisemitic play The Jew of Malta, written at a time when Jewish people were banned from living in England, the titular character “lived upon pickled grasshoppers and sauced mushrooms, and never put on a clean shirt.” Mushrooms’ reputation of being filthy or even dangerous persisted for centuries. Mycologist R. Gordon Wasson popularized a term to describe Western culture’s disdain: mycophobia. Growing amid decay, springing up seemingly at random, mushrooms represented a threat to order.

In some ways, how we talk about mushrooms still carries a tinge of threat. In recent years, they’ve become a horror trope. Fungal spores drift through the air of a sinister parallel universe in the Netflix series Stranger Things. HBO’s The Last of Us brought the zombie fungus into the spotlight, presenting a future in which these creepy mushrooms infect humans, causing an apocalypse. These depictions reflect a different kind of anxiety: worry about the collapse of society as we know it, the degradation of our environment, and looming resource scarcity.

Only now, mushrooms also possess a hopeful allure. We’re learning that they can digest plastic, thrive on oil, and help forests draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. In Fantastic Fungi, actress Brie Larson, a self-proclaimed mycophile, narrates gorgeous time-lapse footage of bioluminescent mushrooms pushing up through the ground and opening their umbrella-like caps: “The answer to our greatest problems might be hiding right under our feet.”

At a time when one in three young adults in the US feels lonely and the average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors, part of fungi’s allure is the promise of connection. In “Fruiting Bodies,” it’s connection between lovers. In the book Finding the Mother Tree, it’s connection to something greater than ourselves. Ecologist and writer Suzanne Simard describes how fungi form a network beneath forests, allowing trees to communicate, share resources, and nurture one another. To imagine this interspecies communication, among a society of organisms that many humans don’t even consider sentient, is akin to looking up at the stars and imagining life elsewhere in the universe—fantastical and awe-inspiring.

Maybe it’s this yearning for connection that is fueling the current psychedelic renaissance. Between 2018 and 2021, the number of young adults using psilocybin, a.k.a. magic mushrooms, and other hallucinogens (aside from LSD) nearly doubled, according to a survey of more than 11,000 people published in the journal Addiction. Books and television shows tout these substances as an answer to the growing prevalence of despair and disconnection. In the Netflix docuseries How to Change Your Mind, based on the Michael Pollan book of the same name, colorful visuals illustrate Kathleen Kral’s experience with psilocybin as she sees herself connected across time to her ancestors, to the Virgin Mary, to her younger self, and to her past traumas. “Often, I just sit there and experience what there is in the present,” she says in an interview. “There’s an opening up to nature and people and life.”

We know that psilocybin makes the brain more plastic, or changeable, opening up users to profound perspectives. In a world that can feel hopeless, mushrooms promise transcendence.

In some ways, mushrooms have attracted our curiosity for the very reasons that they repulsed people for centuries. They crop up amid death and rot, and thrive amid human disturbance, from clearcuts to oil slicks to wildfire burns. They’re disorderly and emerge in unexpected places. They embody a hopeful contradiction: Life is possible amid decay and chaos. Writer and sociologist Anna Tsing explores that tension in The Mushroom at the End of the World, about the precarious livelihoods of people foraging prized matsutake mushrooms in ruined industrial landscapes from the Pacific Northwest to Japan. “To follow matsutake guides us to possibilities of coexistence with environmental disturbance,” Tsing writes.

Fungi aren’t likely to cause an apocalypse anytime soon, nor are they a one-way ticket to environmental salvation or personal revelation. Our obsession with them is, more likely, an act of resistance to the conditions that are producing environmental collapse: individualism, disconnection from the natural world, exploitation of resources for profit. From “Fruiting Bodies” to The Mushroom at the End of the World, stories are recognizing fungi for facilitating a kind of revolutionary intimacy—between lovers, among species, in a world in disrepair.