When there’s not a lot left to eat, things you would never have considered before start looking mighty tasty.
Pine needles. Stinging nettle leaves (pinch the stem to pluck the leaves and roll ’em up tight before you squish the hairs that sting, then eat). The inner layer of tree bark. Insects, so many insects. This weird little lizard that turned out to be surprisingly radiation-resistant and has a fair chance at becoming the new dominant species.
And mushrooms. Turns out the definition of “poisonous” becomes a lot more fluid when you’re starving and for some people these days, death is an acceptable risk. So when this new type started popping up everywhere a few weeks after the blast, we all jumped to try it out. It’s pretty good, actually. Kind of like shitake but with a bit of a crunch to it. Really, really good. Almost overnight, we became mushroom farmers.
You know that many plants rely on other organisms to eat them and spread seeds around in their droppings? It’s probably an evolution thing; plants evolved to bear fruit, which is basically just sugar wrapped around a seed, to coax animals and birds into, basically, becoming involuntary delivery systems for more plants. It’s almost uncanny, some of the ways plants can trick animals into helping them spread. Did you know there’s a Costa Rican shrub whose little cherry-fruit-things actually contain a laxative, to speed up the process? Papa was screaming something about it, in his last days. Nature is truly amazing.
We work hard to grow more mushrooms. Sometimes we work around the clock, planting and watering and weeding and harvesting even as we constantly eat handfuls of our results. Some of us travel far, taking mushrooms with them to start new crops elsewhere. Some of us drop dead in the fields and the others push their remains into the compost heaps to make more plant nutrients. We get warm feelings when we have done well.
At night, the mushrooms glow, softly. It’s beautiful.