A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, but a toadstool is just another mushroom.
The backyard is lush with a rainbow of flora. All the perennials that I have nurtured over the decades reward my senses with their colors and fragrance. But it has been a wet summer, and the rain has awoken little sleepy heads who have poked out all over the lawn. I am going to call them mushrooms, but identifying edible fungi is not my expertise, and my high school biology lessons have completely eluded me. They could be toadstools. What’s the difference?
When I was a child, I associated mushrooms with fairy tales. As an adult, I associate mushrooms with a good steak. However, I can’t remember if the good woodland pixies and fairies live in mushrooms and gnomes live in toadstools or toadstools are just a noxious ingredient that trolls put into their stews.
If I have forgotten high school biology, why would I be remembering the details of fairy tales? This is disturbing. Not my memory loss but the confusion about mushrooms and toadstools.
The all-knowing Google assistant advises me that from a scientific perspective, there isn’t a difference between a mushroom and a toadstool, but in common speech, people tend to refer to inedible or toxic mushrooms as toadstools.
OMG. The university education floods back to the brain. Storytelling was the form of communication that spread information before the written word. Fairy tales were easily remembered by younger members of social groups. The lesson buried in the tales was the warning that some mushrooms are toxic and you need to avoid them. They were called toadstools and associated with distasteful things in stories, so children stayed away from them.
Toadstools are just bitter mushrooms with toxic personalities – much like some unfortunate people.
I am insulated in a green bubble, in a quiet neighbourhood, in a pandemic-free city, and contemplating this mushroom on the lawn. I have an epiphany. Modern society has greater means and capacity to misinform as well as inform. The technology of the current age makes global information upload available in real time.
The newscasts for the past three months have been unbearable. Labels, so many labels; all with good intentions, most influencing social perceptions, but not all doing so positively. Labels stigmatize individuals or groups, because the social perceptions will not acknowledge the view of the other side.
