On science, the ancestors, and digging in the dirt

“Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival” by Maria Pinto

c.2025,

The University of North Carolina Press                   

$23.00                 

240 pages

Something weird is growing on your kitchen sink.

It wasn’t there last night but today? Yeah, and it’s not intentional. You need to get rid of it somehow, wipe it off, kill it, eliminate it or, as in the new book “Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless” by Maria Pinto, maybe study it and eat it.

Junjo or duppy umbrella.

When Maria Pinto was studying a mushroom species she found in a Target parking lot, her mother scoffed. In Jamaica, she said, there were just two kinds of mushrooms, which sent Pinto off on a search. The word “junjo” sounded like something else, which led to another thought, which took her further down the mushroom hole.

As a “melancholic” kid, “weird, queer… a child destined to stay strange,” Pinto’d always been fascinated with dirt and the things growing in it. For awhile, she liked to taste dirt, to know its saltiness. Eventually, she realized that, in eating soil, she was also eating a considerable amount of fungus.

Self-taught, her laboratory extended out her front door, surrounding her house, and out on nearby trails. She began spending time in wooded areas, face to the ground, photographing and getting to know the fungi that she found.

Fungi does not have a “season,” although mushroom-hunting does, and Pinto enjoys the taste of what she finds, experimenting with ways to make each fungus palatable. The smell of one kind of mushroom can vary from the next; sometimes, mushrooms smell like something you’d never want to eat, but in an oddly mouthwatering way.

Fungus, especially in mushroom form, are tainted by race, says Pinto. They were often used as a meat substitute when slaves were underfed – and when they were inedible or even poisonous, they were quite possibly instruments of revenge on overseers or slave masters.

All mushrooms, Pinto points out, are edible. Some just once.

Dirt. You scrub it off your shoes, tumble it from your clothes, wipe it off your hands and watch it swirl down the drain. And after you’ve read “Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless,” you’ll want to look at what’s in it a little closer.

A mycophile is a person who’s interested in mushrooms and fungi, and author Maria Pinto may create a few more of them with her guileless obsession with all things mushroom. She’s unabashed in sharing her biography in this book, which fits with the lessons learned, and she adds history where appropriate but the body of this book teaches readers to want to open their eyes wide to the tiniest things that surround us. Pinto encourages readers to get low, to get dirty, to smell and touch and know nature’s hidden things that many of us might usually rear away from. That’s a practice that’s easy, cheap, and fun.

If you love to eat mushrooms, you enjoy a lighthearted science book, you need a new hobby, or you’ve noticed fungi and wondered about it, this book permits you to find out. Truly, “Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless” is a book to sink your teeth into.