UNTOLD: WHAT IS OPAL FEVER?
Article Nature and wildlife Content
UNTOLD: WHO IS OBSESSED WITH FUNGI?
20 MAY 2024
Feresh is fungi obsessed. Living on her rural property located just outside of Robe on the Limestone Coast, she is on a mission; to educate people on the powers of fungi and how this microorganism can solve some of the world’s most pressing medical, therapeutic and environmental challenges.
There are two things in this life that are certain, no matter your species. Everyone, everything, lives and dies. But there is one thing with the power to “turn death into life again”. Fungi. If Mother Nature is the weaver of all things – stitching together landscapes, fostering biodiversity and keeping the natural balance – then fungi is her needle and thread. Feresh Pizarro became a fungi fanatic after realising that something so unassuming – mushrooms – is the thread that holds our universe together.
Part indigenous Costa Rican and Persian, Feresh now calls the Limestone Coast home thanks to it being a fungi haven. When Feresh looks for guidance – she doesn’t look up to God. She looks down - to Mother Nature. Beneath Feresh’s feet, beneath the rotting pine needles and mulch, surface soil and sand, lies an energy grid. A crisscrossing of nature’s telephone wires known as mycelium. Mycelium, while mostly invisible to the human eye, is a web of fine white veins spreading throughout the soil, with the sole purpose of nourishing its surrounding ecosystem. Acting as the veins of the natural world, mycelium are the roots of fungi – making this remarkable microorganism integral to the circle of life.
Meet Feresh Pizarro
WHAT TYPE OF PERSON BECOMES A FUNGI FANATIC?
Meeting Feresh at her rural property four hours southeast of Adelaide, you’ll likely find her busy inside her homemade greenhouse. Purpose built for her height by her husband, this greenhouse is her temple. She’ll likely be hunching over a plant, a new broccoli sprout reflecting in her depthless brown eyes. Feresh’s passion and energy when talking about nature and new life, is like having a child tell you about their new toys on Christmas Day. Radiating a nurturing and happy disposition, it’s hard to imagine Feresh ever living and working in the concrete jungle of the city four years ago.
Feresh Pizarro
Some believe God created the world, some believe in the big bang. Feresh? She believes in spores. The lifecycle of fungi is her religion now. But it wasn’t always. Growing up in a small village in Costa Rica, Feresh was raised as a Bahai – a religion that teaches the belief of building and living in a just and peaceful society, where all individuals can fulfill their potential. It was this religion that encouraged Feresh to travel and volunteer around the world. “Bahais believe in individual investigation of truth, which means nobody is allowed to tell you what to believe in, it is your job to search,” she says. So, at age 19, setting off on a not-so-typical gap year, Feresh found herself in Israel as part of her own personal investigation of truth. She volunteered her time cleaning people’s houses, while living in an apartment with six women from six different countries.
My mind was given to me to make decisions. Feresh Pizzaro
Feresh grows her own food in a home-made greenhouse
Learning through living, upon reflection Feresh shares that this time taught her about “making things work in a unified, harmonious way”. It was also in Israel that she fell in love with her South Australian husband, Kaz. “I got really blown away by his mind," she says. "I fell in love with his character, his personality, his mind." As is the way in many religions – marriage is the first step, before going on to live together and raise children. After a year of friendship, they already knew they were compatible, skipping the usual courting and going straight to tying the knot before setting sail for Kaz’s home state, South Australia, to raise their first born.
Mushroom details
Cut to today, and while the couple are no longer practising Bahais, the values and ethos of the community ring true in their approach to life. They are still pursuing ways to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Ways to give back to the earth and their community. “My mind was given to me to make decisions,” Feresh explains. “I’m gonna [sic] make a decision because I consciously sit with my own understanding of ethics and my understanding of principles and humanity, and make decisions with my own tool that was given to me, which is my mind.”
Nature has filled the space once occupied by her religion. It’s her spirituality. Much like it is her grandmothers, who lives in a remote indigenous Costa Rican village. Talking fondly of her childhood in Costa Rica with her grandmother, Feresh’s smile spreads like the wings of a butterfly, dimples on display. Describing the village as “paradise,” she recalls living a simple life in sync with nature – learning traditional practices and rituals such as tree hugging. “I remember the cows pulling a cart, and that’s what our village’s main mode of transport was,” she says.
In a society where everyone is constantly in a rush, Feresh laments that we have “no time to fall in love with nature”. So, she finds her own way to fall in love with it again, every day, so as to never forget her own reliance on it. It makes being beside Feresh in nature euphoric. With a sparkle of curiosity and admiration in her eyes, it’s almost as if she is observing her local surroundings – the trees, the plants, the grass and the birds – for the first time every day, despite it being her home for the past four years.
She is the true embodiment of Mother Nature’s child. “We are nothing, and we are everything,” she says with conviction. Today, Feresh has a wealth that money can’t buy – contentment. Feresh’s upbringing in Costa Rica, along with her formative religious experiences, led her to find a moral compass of sorts. And it was pointing to her true north - fungi.
Why is Fungi a secret powerhouse?
Feresh gazes at her homegrown fungi like a mother would at their child – unconditional love and pride glittering in her eyes. Ironically, Feresh recalls a time where she “never thought that (she) had a passion”. Beginning her career as an architect, then business administrator and eventual teacher, Feresh recalls enjoying her jobs but that something was always missing. That was, until she “fell in love with mushrooms”.
The unassuming kingdom that lies beneath our feet, fungi holds incredible untapped potential that could solve some of the world’s most pressing medical, therapeutic and environmental challenges. But, these global issues remain unsolved, in part, because humans have not paid fungi enough attention. “We just think our human intelligence is so much better than everything else,” she says before continuing, “just because trees can’t speak English, doesn’t mean they’re dumb. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t because of fungi.” Her brother wouldn’t be the person he is today either. At the young age of 28, he suffered a stroke – resulting in severe mobility issues to one side of his body. Helping her brother recover, Feresh threw herself into researching ways to regenerate neuroplasticity in the brain and discovered that fungi – specifically Lions Mane – does exactly this.
Just because trees can’t speak English, doesn’t mean they’re dumb. Feresh Pizarro
Experiencing first-hand the power of just one fungi variant catapulted Feresh into the fantastic world of fungi. “It sounds pretty drastic for me to say that they [fungi] can help us save the world, save our humanity,” Feresh admits. But she believes it and drastic or not, the science doesn’t lie. While only 2% of all fungi species have been researched, scientists have discovered fungi that can regenerate the brain, fungi that can decompose plastic, fungi that can clean up oil spills, fungi that can completely eliminate depression and anxiety, fungi that can replace some of our most toxic materials and fungi that can lessen the growth of cancer cells in combination with chemotherapy.
The future is fungi
But there is still a long way to go to research the potential of fungi. This has propelled Feresh into creating her own business – South Spore – to educate people about this often-overlooked organism. Now running workshops from her off-grid home that she and her husband designed and built, Feresh is opening up the gates to her happy place and teaching others about what lies beneath their feet. When you join Feresh as she trails through the forests around the Limestone Coast, don’t be surprised if you bump into a fellow fungi fanatic – Feresh isn’t the only one. When she first began foraging around her new home, amid the towering pines and seemingly silent forests that speckle the landscape, Feresh felt alone. Both physically and spiritually. Isolated, in a new country, with a passion so few knew much about.
But one day it all changed, when Feresh came across a stranger foraging for fungi in the same forest as her, only for them to turn around and say “Oh my god! Somebody has told me about you. I’ve been wanting to meet you!”
“Can you believe it? I thought I was a weirdo,” she jokes.
Interested in foraging for mushrooms? Be sure to take a workshop with an expert like Feresh, and follow advice from SA Health. Do not eat wild mushrooms without being sure of the species. For more information, refer to sahealth.gov.au or get in touch with Feresh.
