author of popular science books that celebrate the microbial world.
Money applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines: Our Lifelong Relationship with Fungi, and reported the following:
Page 99 concerns the microbiological nature of cheese, which is highlighted by the fact that ten billion microbes can grow in a gram of it. Complex interactions between fungi and bacteria control the taste, smell, color, and texture of a maturing cheese. In some cheeses, the bacteria use fungal filaments as physical guides, like miniature railroad lines, for zipping through the rind. Page 99 also introduces the deep history of cheesemaking, which seems to have begun as a way to preserve the nutritional value of raw milk in northern latitudes when fresh meat and vegetables were scarce. Cheese is, as American author Clifton Fadiman wrote, “milk’s leap toward immortality.”Visit Nik Money's website.
Does page 99 effectively provide readers with an accurate snapshot of the book?
The subject of cheese, featured on page 99, is an example of the extended relationship between humans and fungi, and is a relatively poor reflection of the great sweep of the book. Page 99 would probably fail the casual browser. Cheese is an interesting topic, particularly from the perspective of the ancient partnerships between humans and fungi, but it does not get at the richness of our conscious and unconscious interactions. It is one story within the book that celebrates the human-fungus symbiosis near and far, from our dependence on the yeasts of the gut microbiome, or mycobiome, to the ecological activities of mushrooms that support plants and spin the carbon cycle. Between these bookends, readers are introduced to the uses of wild and cultivated fungi as sources food and medicines, which is where cheese appears, and onward to fungal toxins that have shaped human history, and magic mushrooms that open the doors of perception.
Until quite recently, the fungi that grow on the body were viewed as relatively unimportant to our health. They were eclipsed by the more numerous bacteria: trillions of bacteria live in the gut versus billions of fungi. But the fungal cells are enormous compared with bacteria and their combined surface area is equivalent to an eight-person dining table. This means that the fungi offer a lot of real estate for chemical interactions with the immune system and goes a long way toward explaining how such tiny organisms can have such a profound effect on our health. Fungi are important as agents of disease too, and Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines features fungal infections ranging from toenail disintegration to the foulest flesh-melting diseases ever pictured in a pathology textbook. But most of our onboard fungi help to keep us alive: “For a more enlightened sense of self, we have to close our eyes to picture the body as a galaxy of cells, to say, and to believe, ‘I am a trinity, born from one cell, copied in trillions, and filled with other forms of life.’”
--Marshal Zeringue
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