Ayelet Shani's article – Haaretz Newspaper

Tell me about yourself.

I'm Rea, I think I'm a man who was accidentally born a human and not a mushroom. What I do in life is grow mushrooms that give people healing. I didn't always have that desire, but once I was exposed to their virtues, my whole goal in life is to bring them to the forefront. That's the purpose of my life.

And what happened in your life up to this point? At what stations did you stop until you discovered that you were actually a mushroom in human form?

Just to be clear — I don’t really believe I’m a mushroom, do I? But I believe I have a special ability to understand them. Even as a child, I loved spending hours in the forest near the kibbutz I grew up on and picking mushrooms. After I was discharged from the army, I got to see a documentary about people who live in the wild. Mushrooms. After I was discharged from the army, I got to see a documentary about people who live in the wild in the US. There was a couple who collected diarrhea and sold it to fishermen, and another couple who lived in a trailer, walked around the forests, picked mushrooms and sold them to restaurants. I was mesmerized. It stayed in my head, like a shadow. In the meantime, I moved forward in my life, got married, founded and managed a fishing and camping park. Following my ex-wife, I left the north. We moved to the center together, did a degree in sustainability at Reichman, worked on an agribusiness venture. I was living the dream, but I was extremely unhappy.

why?

I wasn't in my natural environment. I started to have anxieties. Difficulties with myself, not with the world. Something I hadn't known before. My venture collapsed. I reached a point where I didn't have a penny in my pocket, I wasn't feeling well at home, everything was black. I decided to leave everything. I told my wife that we were separating and I returned to my parents in the north, devastated. Luckily, I had a dog who simply forced me to get out of bed, because I had to walk with her. I returned to the forests, streams, and mushrooms. Because I really know the forest well, I found all kinds of strange mushrooms. I joined a mushroom group on Facebook, and uploaded pictures of mushrooms I found. These pictures brought all kinds of mycologists to me. I began to enrich my knowledge in the field — from mycologists, from collectors I met in the forest, from books, from groups — this world sucked me in. I was still alone, living with my parents, impoverished, but something in my spirit began to rise.

?You felt like you were touching something.

Yes. I felt that when I was with the mushrooms I was a different person. I'm telling you this now and shudder, because that's exactly how it was. I go out into the forest with terrible anxiety, feeling like I'm going to die of a heart attack in a second, and as soon as I enter the forest, there are no more anxieties or disturbing thoughts. More than that — I feel good. Alive. Happy. Feel like I'm like some kind of animal, that just wants to get to more and more mushrooms. I began to see the connections between types of mushrooms, between a certain mushroom and a certain tree. After two years in the forest, I even discovered a few new varieties that are registered in my name, and I discovered that the "artist of death," the most poisonous mushroom in the world, also grows in Israel. Around this time, I met a special man, his name is Ido. He's an Israeli who grows mushrooms in Bolivia. I joined a mushroom growing course that he taught. It was a short and relatively superficial course, but we clicked. After a few months, he started sending me pictures and messages that he had managed to grow Cordyceps mushrooms. And I tell myself to send me pictures and messages about how he managed to grow Cordyceps. And I tell myself, “What does this snoozer want from me now? Come on, let me go.” He didn’t.

We should open parentheses here and note that it is not trivial that he was able to grow Cordyceps, because Cordyceps grows on a living substrate. It develops inside larvae and feeds on their tissues.

No one in the Western world had managed to grow Cordyceps before Ido. He also convinced me to start consuming it. I felt a change, but I said to myself, well, after he had eaten my head like that, it's clear that the fungus was affecting me. I bought a lot of mushrooms from him and gave them to my acquaintances. An experiment. After a few weeks, I started hearing crazy things. Blood tests that had improved. My sisters, who suffer from endometriosis, tell me they no longer have pain. I said okay, there's something here that I want to be a part of. I told Ido — I want to be your tool carrier. I bought mushrooms from him and sold them in the community of therapists. I didn't make a living from it, but I continued to see and hear about the results.

And when did you decide to jump into the water?

A little before the coronavirus, Ido left the country for Vietnam, to grow his mushrooms there. One day he calls me, all in tears. He's done. He tells me they're throwing him out of there because he's illegal. I was the operations manager at Kayaki Ha-Goshrim at the time. When I heard him like that, broken, I told him, "You know what? Come on. I'm leaving everything. We'll set up an insurance policy for your work here in Israel." He sent me to some warehouse he had in a shack. He had tools and cultures there that had been lying in a refrigerator that hadn't worked for a year. I took everything. For a while, every day, we talked for hours on video — and he taught me the entire growing process. I took over a room at my parents' house and made a flowering room there. I took a container from the Kayaki area and made it a laboratory — and so, every day, I would arrive at four in the morning, examine the processes, fix it, get materials. In the end, mushrooms grew. I can't even describe the feeling. I managed to grow Cordyceps.

Without caterpillars.

A caterpillar has nearly 30 metabolic processes in its life before it becomes a butterfly. For Cordyceps to grow inside the caterpillar, it needs the spore to attach to a specific area of ​​its body, at a specific timing and stage of the caterpillar’s ​​life, and at a specific temperature.

Probabilistically, this is a problematic event.

The chance is one in trillions of spores, I think. Ido managed to trace this process and simulate it. We grow the fungus on a special substrate of grains, which we enrich with all kinds of vitamins and ingredients that exist in insects. We simulate the life cycle of the insect. There is also the matter of the amount of food, temperature, pressure, amount of carbon dioxide. There are many variables.

We are now sitting on your breeding farm in Kfar Yehoshua. How did we get from the small container in kayaks to where we are now?

I recruited partners — people who understand business, regulations, and finances — and started growing mushrooms on a small farm in Beit Hillel. When the war broke out, we were evacuated from the north and moved here. There was a long period of uncertainty, we had no supply, a lot of mushrooms went to waste, we felt there was no point in investing in a new location, because we would soon be returning home. But in the meantime, the months passed, and we continued to pay money and not sell anything. It was frustrating and difficult. A challenging period, which we somehow overcame. Now we have stabilized. We have established a good infrastructure. We are making progress.
“I started consuming Cordyceps mushroom and felt a change for the better. I gave it to my friends as an experiment. After a few weeks I start hearing crazy things. Blood tests that have improved, for example. People are sick

" That they stopped suffering from pain. I said okay, there's something here that I want to be a part of."

You grow medicinal mushrooms like Reishi, Cordyceps, Hirisium. There's been a lot of interest in mushrooms in recent years, just not these. People are interested in psilocybin.

Absolutely. I get asked all the time for psilocybin. So no. I don't grow it. I have a lot of them, but I don't do it, because it's illegal.

On their way to the mainstream, mushrooms, like cannabis, have to deal with the pharmaceutical world. It's a high hurdle. The pharmaceutical world doesn't like things that aren't patented.

This is another reason I don't deal with psilocybin. I really don't want to get to those places. I don't want to turn it into a drug, because the world of drugs is complex and complicated, and there will be all kinds of corporations that will get involved because of economic interests. Ultimately, my ambition is to bring the East closer to the West. In China, no one asks what this mushroom will do for them — they simply consume it and it's part of their life. It takes the West a long time to understand that there are also mushrooms that don't alter consciousness. It takes time, and unfortunately, industrial production also tarnishes the reputation of these mushrooms, because people consume them and don't feel a change. You told me that you took mushrooms in a capsule. You tried it and it didn't help you, right?

That's right. In general, the market is flooded with mushroom products. In powders. In capsules. In extracts. In drinks. What's the deal with that? Does it work?

The world of nutritional supplements, regardless of mushrooms, is made up of companies that are brand companies. There are nutritional supplement factories, and the companies order from the factories and market. In fact, the brand owners don't know what's in the formula.

And in the context of mushrooms?

There is a factory in China, the size of half the State of Israel. They do an insane job. Hats off to them. They produce mushroom mycelium for 90% of the world. They have all the necessary standards, the required forms, and all that remains is to package and market. The point is that none of those who sell them lie.

Are you sure? I checked a lot of company websites, in Israel and around the world. They all state that they sell pure mushrooms.

This is a global trend, it really doesn’t just happen in Israel. And they’re not lying. That’s the thing. They say “We sell pure reishi mushrooms.” There’s no lie here. It’s just that the capsule contains, what’s called, feathers from another peacock.

So that's a lie.

It's not a lie, because it really is reishi. Think, say, of making wine, but using the leaves and branches of the vine.

Well, then that's a lie.

Not a lie. It's just that no one gives real labels. They go around saying, "Studies show," and all that pun, but no one lies.

So maybe it's a lie, but maybe they believe it themselves.

It can't be, for sure. I'm convinced they believe in themselves.

What about the placebo effect? ​​Obviously there is also a matter of dosages, and quality, and still, let's say I

A person doesn't believe. Doesn't believe in mushrooms, doesn't believe in you. Will this work for me?

If someone doesn't believe it in advance, I wouldn't suggest they start at all. On the other hand, I can tell you that my father, a kibbutznik, a fisherman, has no emotion in him. He lost a brother — I didn't see a tear. Of course, he laughed at me and the mushrooms, but he said, come on, let me take your mushrooms. His blood tests changed, and he was still skeptical. After about two years, they discovered a certain disease in him, and I started treating him with compounds that I prepared for him, a little more aggressive, and today there is no trace of it. He says he feels like he's 16 and if he runs out of mushrooms, he immediately calls to ask me about it. So it's a matter of dosages, and how you consume it, and of course safety. Do you trust the person who gave you the mushrooms? Because if you don't, and if you don't commit to the process, that's a problem.

Let's talk about the challenge you've set for yourself, to control the entire chain. From the cultivation stage to

The extraction.

If we compare it to a standard farmer, I am also the producer of the seedlings, who works on the genetics and the cultures, and I am also the farmer who grows, and also the man who processes and extracts. I simply realized that if I am not on top of everything, all the time, I will not be able to represent what I believe in.

Exciting. I really wanted to. Mad Scientist – You showed me your growth chambers. In the atmosphere of

Let me start playing with it. Explain the growing process.

It is circular, like the cycle of the fungus itself. I start with the culture, which comes from nature or from universities in the East. I can use tissue culture, which basically means that I take a piece of fungus and produce new mushrooms from it, and I can also work with spores, which are a new generation. I need a culture that is strong and good, that will yield a crop and will know how to live for a long time. If I see weakening, that means starting to take out a spore from here and a spore from there and start something new. Endless work. Then I grow the mycelium in liquid culture, which is the fermentation process. That's where most of the industrial world stops, where they already have the product. I continue — preparing growth media enriched with vitamins and proteins, depending on the preference of the culture, transferring it to the inoculation and incubation processes, and from there to the flowering room. The flowering can take two or three months. Our challenge is to make it take as long as possible. After it grows, it also needs to be dried, and I came to the conclusion that heat drying damages its qualities, so I'm going with freeze-drying, which is a challenging technology, and I didn't want to let an outside factory do it, because again, the qualities could be damaged. In short, it's complex. I really have no choice but to be on top of it at every stage. To control the entire process.

If we were to take your case as a test case, say in some faculty of management, we would

They tell you to close immediately. Sensitive product, long process, huge depreciation, high risks. There were

We advise you to order from China like everyone else.

I don't deny that it has a price, and that it's challenging, but I came to educate. I will never order from China in the first place, because it bores me. If I trade mushrooms like that, I can go trade on the stock exchange or be a waiter or I don't know what. Where is my love for mushrooms? I'm in this field from a place of love, not from a place of money. Obviously I need to bring food home, I'm not naive, but that's not why I do it. The reason is that I understand the power of mushrooms. Whoever wants to make money, fine. As far as I'm concerned, others should make money. I came to create a reality.

?You respect the mushroom.

Respect, love, cherish, everything. I thank her for her very existence, because personally, it saved me, and I want everyone to feel that way. After October 7th, we are all scarred. People in distress call me all the time and say that there are no appointments for psychiatrists for months to come. I see that mushrooms can help. Maybe they don’t solve everyone’s problem, but they help. At the beginning of the war, I sent thousands of bottles for free to Gaza. Soldiers reported that they had more energy. That they were able to sleep better at night. I also accompany quite a few Nova victims and IDF fighters. It doesn’t help everyone, but for those for whom it helps, I get up every day at four in the morning.

What's the deal with four in the morning?

When you do something you love, you're on top of it. Every day, when I get to the farm and see the mushrooms growing, I get excited about it all over again.

Let's talk about this position — you are both a breeder and a kind of caregiver. Set me straight for a moment.

At the event.

I'm not a therapist, God forbid. I didn't study alternative medicine, and certainly not mainstream medicine. The process I went through in my soul, in my life, allowed me to look at people a little differently. Before , I was super-judgmental. I stopped. Today, when I look at people, even if they behave in an unacceptable way, I'm able to accommodate it, because I understand that the behavior has nothing to do with intention, it comes from distress.

But do you know what is right for whom, and how, and how much? How did you figure out, for example, what exactly your father

must?

I didn't understand, but at the end of the day I have experience with mushrooms that no one else has. I may not know how to speak the professional, therapeutic language, but I understand, in practice, what it does to people. I don't know how to explain exactly how, and I don't have the tools to understand all the processes that the mushroom does, but I have experience and a feeling. A while ago I was a guest on a podcast, and we talked about mental therapy with mushrooms. People started calling me, asking for help and asking how much I charge for therapy. I don't charge money, of course, because I don't provide therapy. I grow mushrooms. But somehow I found myself accompanying dozens of people, day after day.

How was it for you?

Shocking. It made me so bad. It was so hard for me to hear about the hardships, it flooded all my problems and everything I experienced. I decided to separate. I am not a therapist. My goal is to give tools to people who are expert therapists, and I need to produce mushrooms for them. So that they have another tool in their toolbox. “Every mushroom has bad potential and good potential, and it depends on its food. There is a mushroom that people really like to pick in Israel — morchella. But people don’t know that if they pick it in citrus groves, they will get a severe poison. There is a certain substance in the tree and leaves of citrus that it knows how to break down, and it turns it into a toxin.”

We're revolving around words like meaning, mission, in this conversation. Maybe even

Designation.

Absolutely. Except for the purpose. It's not. It's like defining what the role of the fungus is in nature, so that we can talk about it. No. The fungus has no role related to us. It's like saying that humans are destroying the globe. That puts us in a position of superiority over nature. We are destroying it, but so is destroying the globe. That puts us in a position of superiority over nature. We are destroying it, but the destruction of the globe is also part of its cycle.

Today I write this in Haaretz, tomorrow people will come here with pitchforks. When I did

I actually read the research that the mushroom obsession is already starting to destroy my daughter.

Their growth changes the ecosystem in all the places where these mushrooms grow.

nonsense.

Explain.

Before I grow mushrooms, I pick. I don't think there are many people in Israel who have spent as much time in the forest as I have. That's the essence of my life. Picking. I go back to the field again and again, monitor the weather, note when it first rained. I collect all the data and follow it, so I know where to go next year. What we do, picking mushrooms, is nothing compared to what the pigs do, when they dig and turn the soil. Picking cannot harm the mycelium that has been in the soil for who knows how many years. Reducing living areas, sewage, air pollution — that's it. Picking doesn't harm. You don't have to go with a special basket, with holes, to scatter the spores. That's nonsense. The spores are everywhere, and the mycelium also knows how to produce spores in the soil. By the way, what really ruins it is that they always say to cut the mushroom with a knife so as not to uproot it from the ground. Bullshit. The metal is much worse for the colony and may contaminate the entire substrate. Uproot it from the ground, cover it a little, believe me, later another fungus will come out. “At the beginning of the war, I sent thousands of bottles for free to Gaza. Soldiers reported that they had more energy. That they were able to sleep better. I also accompany quite a few Nova casualties and IDF fighters. It doesn’t help everyone, but for those who do, I get up every day at four in the morning.”

If we are already in intuitive areas, is there a difference between a parasitic fungus and

A fungus that is not parasitic. In their essence? In the way they help?

All sorts of nonsense are said about Cordyceps. That it takes over the insect's brain. That it makes it climb high up the tree and open its mouth. That's not true. The fungus has no idea that it's enslaving an insect now, the insect climbs the tree because it's part of its life. The way the fungus will work is determined by its abilities, the challenges it faced and as a result of which it developed the specific active ingredients it contains. I generally oppose the categorization of mushrooms. Poisonous mushrooms, medicinal mushrooms — there's no such thing. Every mushroom has the potential for destruction and the potential for regeneration.

And what will decide whether it destroys or builds?

Her food. There's a mushroom called morchella. They're really excited to pick it in Israel. What they don't understand is that if they pick it in citrus groves, they'll get severely poisoned. There's a certain substance in the wood and leaves of citrus that it knows how to break down, and it turns it into a toxin. The chicken of the woods mushroom that I really like — when it grows on eucalyptus, it produces psychoactive substances inside it. Why? It breaks down something that's inside the tree. When it grows on carob or oak, that doesn't happen. Do you understand how significant food is, how much it affects her abilities?

Can you try to describe to me how you think? When you cross-reference a specific fungus with

Its new use, for example.

I don't think. I just do.

Try it for a moment. Even if it's intuitive.

I'll try to explain to you what I feel when I walk in the forest, okay? In general, what's special about a mushroom is that today it's here, tomorrow it's gone. And vice versa. Yesterday there was nothing, today there's a structure 40 centimeters above the ground. Not like a plant, which develops over weeks or months. When I walk in the forest, I'm not even necessarily looking for mushrooms. I'm looking for something that's not part of the landscape. I'm scanning. I'm looking for the unrelated bump under the pine needles. It's not a stone. The mushroom called the "willow nettle," for example, I see because its growth pattern causes the pine needles to do a kind of swirl. A vortex. So I have this knowledge, and all these thoughts about mushrooms, and if I suddenly read an item in the newspaper about some phenomenon, I think — wait, maybe this and that mushroom can help with this and that situation? Let's try. And I try. Just doing. Without fear. I am not afraid to try. I was not afraid to send ten thousand bottles to Gaza, without asking questions. I think my starting point is that mushrooms have no boundaries. That for every thought or problem there is a solution that might be found within the mushroom, and it is worth trying. That is it. All rights reserved to Haaretz Publishing Ltd. ©