An Ode to Little Brown Mushroom

A new low-key emoji that doesn't need to scream, she whispers

She’s confident.

She’s mindful.

She’s cutesy.

I am of course talking about … little brown mushroom 🍄‍🟫.

Little brown mushroom 🍄‍🟫 doesn’t roll into your keyboard tripping on her hypersensitive awareness of time and space. She doesn’t look like a clown with a red cap covered in polka dots. She is presentable. She minds her business foraging in the woods without having visual and auditory hallucinogens. She is … very demure. She is the newest edible included in the Unicode Standard sitting in the “Food and Drink“ section of your emoji keyboards.

Don’t worry, brown mushroom did not replace our favorite black-light dorm poster shroom and Mario power up. Now, we have two mushrooms (🍄🍄‍🟫). Due to her adorable fairy home symbolism 🧚🍄 and toxic association 🍄☠️ (though death from ingestion is very rare) the fly agaric toadstool amanita muscaria is thriving in “Animals and Nature” alongside all the flowers and shrubs.

The brown mushroom was released in the Emoji 15.1 (2024) update.

The amanita muscaria has been in our keyboards since Unicode’s first emoji release in 2015.

She’s a legend 🍄

It is impossible to talk about the new brown mushroom without mentioning the amanita muscaraia which seems to have hypnotized us (it is a hallucinogenic). It’s in fairy-inspired crafts, in murals, in fashion . It’s in Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. Who could forget the dancing mushroom sequence in Fantasia? Smurfs lived in them 🍄! Our red-capped polka dot adorned mushroom is simply iconic, capable of conveying everything from whimsy, enchantment, “super powers” and an altered state of mind. All of this sounds fun until you realize amanita muscarias also causes nausea, salivation, tremors, vomiting and diarrhea.

Making you a mindful salad: 🥬🥕🧅🌽🧄🌶🍄‍🟫🔪 🥣

Preparing a (achem) very brazen salad: 🥬🥕🧅🌽🧄🌶🍄🔪 🥣

Petroglyphs depicting anthropomorphized mushrooms or Shamen. Dating back 40,000 years ago. Source: Fungi in Early Art

As Old as Dirt

While the red-capped mushroom continues to dominate pop-culture, the depiction of mushrooms in art goes back as far as 40,000 years ago according to forager Angel Schatz. For thousands of years and all around the globe humans have depicted mushrooms in cave drawings, petroglyphs, mushroom stones, and in Renaissance paintings. They held a place of great status (likely due to their psychedelic and medicinal properties). A variety of ancient Egyptian texts hypothesis that the different stages of the Egyptian crown designated different stages of psychedelic mushrooms.

But when did people start eating mushrooms not to see god but simply as food? Peter Jordan writes in his Field Guide to Edible Mushrooms of Britain and Europe that, “Food tasters were employed by Roman emperors to ensure that mushrooms were safe to eat.” But, mycophagy dates much further back. Edible mushroom species have been found in association with 13,000-year-old archaeological sites in Chile and there is evidence that mushrooms were used as human food in prehistoric Europe after discovering a bowl of mushrooms near Nola in Italy.

In contemporary times, you will also discover some sautéed mushrooms, onions, garlic, kale, and mozzarella in my belly after pizza night. 🤪

Persepehone, Queen of the Underworld. Fragment de stèle funéraire, L’Exaltation à la fleur. 500 BCEUsed with other food emoji to denote food prep

And this is precisely why the inclusion of the brown mushroom is so elegant. She’s not trying to replace our favorite red-capped shroom. She offers us a world of earthy simplicity beyond her companion’s fairyland legacy. She is an unassuming candidate representing the world of fungi without having to encode each variety of myceliums, morels, porcinis, truffles, and champignons. Little brown mushroom emoji is here for all your grocery store text messages, nature walk captions, culinary videos, and cottage core vibes. She’s not doing crazy, she’s not doing too much. Little brown mushroom is *demure*.