Reishi

Last week I was so sick that it felt like my brain was slowly leak­ing out of my head through my nose. I’ve had a jar of lingzhi, or pow­dered reishi mush­room, sit­ting on my kitchen counter for months, but I never felt like I was sick enough to have any until then. After one glass of “tea” and a night of decent sleep, I felt bet­ter than after any­thing else I tried. My sinuses cleared, my nose dried up, the headache at the back of my neck went away, and the only thing left was the scratch­i­ness in my throat.

I’d heard of lingzhi before, as my dad started drink­ing it daily a few years ago, but never really under­stood, or believed, it’s mag­i­cal prop­er­ties until now. As a child grow­ing up in a Chinese fam­ily, it’s not uncom­mon to be exposed to all sorts of eso­teric appendages and veg­e­ta­tion, but noth­ing was as revered as the reishi mush­room, not even gin­seng. It turns out that it has a his­tory as the old­est mush­room to be used in med­i­cine over 4000 years ago, and peas­ants were once exe­cuted for con­sum­ing such a valu­able resource as it was reserved exclu­sively for the emperor and his family.

As described in Wikipedia:

Lingzhi is anti-tumor, immunomod­u­lat­ing and immunother­a­peu­tic. It is also adap­to­genic, anti-allergin and anti-hypertensive due to the pres­ence of triter­penes. Apart from these prop­er­ties, lingzhi has also been found to be anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, anti-parasitic, anti-fungal, anti-diabetic, anti-hypotensive, and hepato­pro­tec­tive. It has also been found to inhibit platelet aggre­ga­tions, and to lower blood pres­sure, cho­les­terol and blood sugar.

It makes me quite proud to have such a sig­nif­i­cant sub­stance as a part of my cul­tural his­tory, a lit­tle secret known only to those lucky enough. Perhaps I may feel the same way about tiger penises some day.

The only down­side is the taste. I’m sure it’s noth­ing like eat­ing cock­roaches on Fear Factor, but it’s def­i­nitely a play on the palate that takes a bit of get­ting used to. The smell reminds me of the musty scent of old, dried, golden coloured lum­ber, that’s crumbly and falling apart. This comes as no sur­prise, as it only grows on the trunks of dead trees. Even though it comes in (clumpy) pow­der form, it doesn’t exactly dis­solve in water. At all. The pic­ture of the mug is after a good stir and five min­utes of set­tling. For some rea­son, half of it sinks and half of it floats. I tried to describe it to John, and the best I could come up with is that some­how it’s an entire glass of dregs.