For reluctant vegetarians, mushrooms can be a guilt-free meaty-tasting treat. But they’re also an unlikely climate villain. Why? Because growers need to add a casing layer of peat to the straw and manure substrate that mushrooms are grwon in to them 'fruit'.
As regular readers will know, peat is a climate superhero, absorbing up to six times as much carbon as rainforests per kg of biomass. As a result, the UK government has promised to restore 280,000 hectares of peatland by 2050.
Unfortunately, almost all mushrooms commercially produced in the UK use peat casings. That equates to around 100,000 cubic metres of peat a year. That’s 11% of total UK peat extraction, which equates to about 10 hectares per year (or 14 football pitches). Because peat bogs grow so slowly (about 1mm per year) it would take around 10,000 years for the land to recover.
The UK government has awarded £108,000 to a project investigating peat-free alternatives. Powdered bark, coir and rich peat-free compost all show promise, but their commercial use is still some way off.
That means that, as a consumer, there’s not a lot you can do right now (short of cutting back on mushrooms). However, once they do become available, picking mushrooms with a 'peat-free' label will mean guilt-free eating.
Photo by Christine Siracusa on Unsplash
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