The Sweat of a Mushroom

Have you ever wondered why, when buying mushrooms, you put them in a brown paper bag instead of a plastic bag like all the other produce? I haven’t, shrug.

When I was a child and would tag along with my mom as she went grocery shopping I noticed that mushrooms went in the the mini brown paper bag, and I thought it was fun (yeah, weird, I know), but I never wondered why. It was just the way it was done.

As an adult, when I grocery shop, I automatically put mushrooms in the supplied brown paper bags and never question why I do it, it is just how things are done.

Normally I question everything so when I realized I had never questioned this it got me wondering why I never wondered about it, and would I have ever wondered about it if my grocery store hadn’t run out of those mini brown paper bags, thereby forcing me to either buy the over priced pre-sliced mushrooms or buy the non-sliced mushrooms and put them in a plastic bag?

Oh the oh-so-deep places my brain goes… 😉 (sarcasm people, that’s sarcasm!)

Last week I bought mushrooms and put them in a plastic bag because that is all the store had, I vaguely wondered if this was going to affect the mushrooms but once I put them away in my kitchen I didn’t think about them again. Go figure that mushrooms don’t hold a huge section of my brain’s thoughts. 😉

I discovered why we don’t put mushrooms in plastic bags and ew, it was not pretty!

Mushrooms sweat.

I thought about saying they cry, since that seems less gross, but nope, with the amount of liquid on those suckers it just has to be called sweat. Icky, gross, dripping sweat.

Why was I never told this??

I innocently pulled a mushroom out of the bag and was all “what the hell, why is it wet?” I washed it, then peeled the top layer off of it, sliced it and threw it in the frying pan and when it was mooshed in with the other ingredients I was eating that meal I didn’t notice it all that much.

My lesson from this was that it may be gross but it can be washed and salvaged.

However, the next day I went and grabbed another mushroom and it was even wetter, ugh. I washed it, and peeled it and well, there’s no nice way to say this, it had died a tragic, liquidy death, it just couldn’t be salvaged. It was gone.

Well ok, not gone gone since it was in my hand, but gone as in it wasn’t going to fulfill it’s life purpose which was to be eaten and provide nutrients to someone’s body.

I couldn’t even slice that thing, it just fell apart in my hand.

So my new lesson was: Don’t ever put mushrooms in a plastic bag, you will regret it!

Tags: cooking at home, eating healthy, food, healthy living, losing weight, mushrooms, sweat