Alice, fumbling through Wonderland, comes across a mushroom. One bite of it shrinks her down in size. Chowing on the other side makes her swell up, huge, taller than the treetops. Urgently, Alice sets to work “nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter,” until finally she succeeds in “bringing herself down to her usual height” — whereupon everything feels “quite strange.”
Is this Lewis Carroll’s 1865 fantasy tale or … the average body-conscious, improvement-obsessed 2026 Whole Foods shopper? Mushrooms, long venerated in literature as dark transformative forces, have become Goopified. Nowadays, you can chug “adaptogenic mushroom coffee,” slurp “functional mushroom cocoa,” doze off with “mushroom sleep drops” or ingest/imbibe any number of other tinctures in the billion-dollar fungal supplements market that promise to fine-tune, or even totally recalibrate, the self. The latest and hottest items in this booming new retail category are mushroom gummies, gushed over by wellness influencers, spilling out from supermarket shelves right there next to your standard cough drops and protein bars.
Fungi have aided medical advances like antibiotics and statins, it’s true, and certain species have shown promising results in fighting Parkinson’s or cancer — but what these pastel gumdrops proffer is a broader, more elliptical “cellular well-being.” The mystique feels intentional on product-makers’ part: Like Carroll’s baffled heroine, maybe you’re meant to be in a bit of thrall to the mysterious, almighty mushroom — lurching through Wonderland, charmed and confused by design. After all, you wonder, what are these ancient, alien creatures, growing in the secret dark? Hippocrates was supposedly using them to cauterize wounds around the 5th century B.C.E. In the Super Mario video games, mushrooms might give you extra lives; in HBO’s “The Last of Us,” they bring about the ruin of human civilization.
I recently tried one particular product, a richly hued set of squishy cones called WonderDay Mushroom Gummies that has infiltrated Target, Sprouts and Whole Foods stores across the country. It’s made by Plant People, a Unilever-backed start-up whose founders say they are already “No. 1 best sellers” at the Californian cult grocer Erewhon. According to the company, a proprietary blend of lab-tested, chef-crafted, research-backed “functional mushrooms” (lion’s mane, chaga, reishi, turkey tail, royal sun and cordyceps, to be specific) will regulate mood, sharpen focus and memory, balance gut health, deliver an on-demand surge of energy and stamina and promote a “healthy stress response” to boot — all via two bitsy jellies a day.
You’d of course have to be silly not to want those things. I bought the gummies on sight. Faithfully, I ate them for a month straight, often in double or triple the recommended amounts, ready and eager to experience the promised surge of focus/energy/balance/mood. The globs were pleasantly fruity, with a mildly astringent aftertaste, and easy on the palate. Their texture reminded me of the candy I least liked receiving on Halloween as a child: Dots, those stern, inflexible heaps that would scatter and lodge into secret crevices between your teeth, forcing you to attempt blind dental surgery with fingers and tongue for hours afterward.
Yet in the way of focus/energy/balance/mood, sadly, Plant People’s gummies did not produce a noticeable effect. Frustrated, I also tried out Om and Nütrops, two other mushroom-gummy offerings that rank high on Amazon, ordered by hundreds to thousands of people a month. These globules both seemed geared more toward hard-core health nerds than to casual, matcha-latte-sipping Target shoppers. But they, too, did a sum total of not-much — apart from tasting less like Dots and more like Robitussin.
The research on mushrooms is sound. But “the popular imagination is way ahead of where the science is,” David Hibbett, a mycologist and an evolutionary biologist who is “deeply skeptical” of mushroom-infused supplements, told me. Though reishi mushrooms have stimulated white blood cells in one preclinical trial, there’s a lack of evidence that a little bit of reishi extract squashed into a non-F.D.A.-vetted splotch of jelly could do the same; the cordyceps species mass-produced into supermarket bonbons also are worlds apart from the elusive, potent, immunity- and stamina-boosting Ophiocordyceps.
Strip away all the confused science and all the mushroom lore, though — the abundant stories, the myths, the longtime thematic associations that are hard for the gullible consumer brain to shake — and you are still left with some very clever marketing. Mushroom supplements don’t profess to be medicine, targeting a particular ailment. They don’t even presume there is anything “wrong.” What they dangle is more like a head-to-toe empowerment, a D.I.Y. path to a Better You. In an environment of increasing scientific mistrust, perhaps the idea of self-transformation has a certain extra sheen.
And the real masterstroke as of late has been the harnessing of these vibey mushroom benefits into a candy — a comforting, pleasurable token of childhood, now doubly rewarding because it’s promised to be therapizing, some sort of natural, woodsy ibuprofen for the soul.
In liquid or pill form, fungal gummies’ core sell might be toward our impulse to domesticate wild things, to tame the untameable for personal profit. The gummified versions imply this control impulse is safe, fun — something that the child in you, the most innocent, wide-eyed, Alice-like version of you, could savor. (Plant People, for its part, stresses that its gummies are not to be consumed by those under 21.) This directive — to thoroughly enjoy yourself on the journey of self-transformation — might not have a tangible effect on your health. But it has the ability to profoundly alter your sense of your health. Which, for tired adults pushing grocery carts at the end of a long day, might just end up being the same thing.
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