The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi — Review

I picked up The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi: Exploring the Microscopic World in Our Forests, Homes, and Bodies by Keith Seifert expecting another Entangled Life. That's not what it is, and I think the book is better for it.

Seifert spent forty years as a working mycologist with Agriculture Canada. You can tell. The book reads like a tour through his career — the rooms in your house, the soil under a farm field, the forest floor, the inside of your own body — narrated by someone who actually obsesses over Latin names and isn't pretending he doesn't. He calls the fungi "my friends," and after a few chapters it stops sounding twee and starts sounding accurate.

The framing that worked for me: most people, when they hear "fungus," think of the mushroom on a pizza or the toenail problem they'd rather not discuss. Mushrooms are the visible part — the fruiting body — but the actual organism lives underground or inside something else as strands of hyphae. The visible mushroom is the tip of the iceberg. The book is mostly about everything below the waterline.

How it's organised

Structurally, it's organised around where the fungi live. Forests. Croplands. Foods and fermentation. The built environment. The animal body. That frame works, because it lets him bring in big ideas without having to introduce them in the abstract — the "Wood Wide Web" shows up in the forest chapter, the sacred trilogy of wine, cheese and chocolate shows up in the food chapter, mycoremediation and Quorn and antibiotic resistance show up where they belong. The room-by-room tour of which species live in your house is the chapter that stayed with me. It is not a comfortable read.

A few things to know going in

1. It is dense. Seifert opens with a note on scientific names — he calls Latin a "necessary evil" and the modern classification system "a phone book for looking up the evolutionary address of a fungus." That preface is doing real work. If you skip it, the first chapter will hit harder than you expect. One reviewer compared it to Tolstoy. They were not entirely joking.

2. It is not Entangled Life. Sheldrake's book is the lyrical one. Seifert's is the working scientist's book — more case studies, more practical applications, more of the medical and economic story. If you wanted poetry, you have the wrong book. If you wanted to understand why a mycologist spends a career on this, you have the right one.

3. More images would have helped. When he describes the morphology of a new fungal protagonist, you're often picturing it from words alone. A few more plates would have done a lot.

What it changed for me

The thing the book changed for me is the assumption that "fungi" mostly means "mushrooms." It doesn't. The microfungi — moulds, yeasts, lichens, slimes, endophytes — are the kingdom. The mushrooms are the part that happens to grow large enough that we noticed them first. Seifert's whole career has been on the part we did not.

Worth reading. Read the preface.