Sliding my thumb across the glass, I watch the saturation of the neon-pink gummy icon jump out against the flat white background of the mobile browser. It is a perfect cube, glistening with a dusting of citric acid and sugar, looking more like a high-end candy from a boutique in Tokyo than a biological gateway.
The Cube
The Organism
Beside it, almost as an afterthought in the grid layout, is a high-resolution photo of dried caps. They are dusty, spindly, and shaped like the hats of tired gnomes. They look, quite frankly, like something you would find under a rotting log, which is exactly where they belong. But the data shows that the modern buyer skips the log and goes straight for the cube.
The Acrid Scent of Carbon and Convenience
I am currently looking at this screen while my kitchen fills with the acrid, unmistakable scent of charred shallots. I was supposed to be deglazing the pan for a simple balsamic reduction, but I got caught on a work call about the wildlife corridor I’m mapping for the state.
My boss wanted to know about the ‘delivery mechanism’ of the fencing-whether we were using the 13-gauge mesh or the heavier link. I was trying to explain that the elk don’t care about the gauge; they care about the scent of the meadow on the other side. By the time I hung up, the shallots were carbon. I’m staring at the screen now, ignoring the smoke, thinking about how we have finally reached a point where the delivery mechanism is more famous than the destination.
In the ethnobotanical world, we are witnessing a weird, quiet colonization. It’s the colonization of the species by the format. We have entered an era where “gummy” or “capsule” or “micro-dose tab” has become the primary noun, and the actual organism inside-the Psilocybe semilanceata or the Psilocybe cubensis-has been relegated to a footnote that nobody bothers to read. It’s as if we’ve decided that the envelope is more important than the letter.
“The greatest mistake humans make is assuming that because we’ve paved over something, the underlying terrain has ceased to exist.”
– Rachel E.S., Wildlife Biologist
Rachel E.S., a colleague of mine who spends her days tracking how mountain lions navigate suburban sprawl, once told me this during a late-night mapping session. We do the same thing with our supplements and our sacraments. We wrap them in pectin and corn syrup until the “wildness” is theoretically tamed. We want the experience, but we want it to come in a flavor called Blue Raspberry.
Botanical Erasure and the Illiterate Consumer
This isn’t just a matter of aesthetic preference. It’s a botanical erasure. When you buy a gummy, you are buying a packaging decision. When you buy a species, you are making a biological decision. The two are being conflated in a way that produces a generation of consumers who are incredibly literate in texture and incredibly ignorant in ecology.
They know exactly how many milligrams are in their 13-count pack, but they couldn’t tell you the difference between a wood-loving species and one that grows in a cow pasture. The irony is that the more “approachable” we make these organisms, the more we distance ourselves from their reality.
A dried mushroom is a difficult thing to confront. It’s ugly. It tastes like dirt and ancient memories. It requires you to acknowledge that you are consuming a fungus-a life form that breathes oxygen and digests the world around it. A gummy, on the other hand, requires nothing from you. It asks you to chew. It fits into the same mental category as a vitamin C supplement or a piece of saltwater taffy.
According to a survey of 123 dispensaries, 63% of new users could not name the species they were consuming, referring to them simply as “the gummies.”
I remember this survey clearly-conducted across 123 different dispensaries-where 63 percent of new users couldn’t name the species of the product they were consuming. They just called it “the gummies.” It’s a linguistic collapse. If you go to a fine restaurant and the waiter asks if you want the “poultry format” or the “bovine format,” you’d walk out.
You want to know if it’s a heritage breed chicken or a grass-fed ribeye. Yet, in the realm of high-potency botanicals, we’ve been conditioned to accept the format as the identity. This shift is particularly evident when you look at how curated platforms attempt to bridge the gap.
When I browse a site like Entheoplants, there is a palpable tension between the modern demand for convenience and the ancestral reality of the plant. You see the Liberty Caps listed there, and they don’t look like “units.” They look like individuals. They have variations in color, stipe length, and cap curvature. They demand that you look at them as a species first and a product second.
The Tide of the Saturday Market
But the market is a heavy tide. For every person who wants to sit with a handful of dried caps and reflect on the soil they came from, there are 233 people who just want to pop a capsule and get on with their Saturday. I understand the impulse. I really do.
As I scrape the blackened shallots into the trash, I realize I’m doing the same thing. I’m looking for a “meal format” that requires zero engagement from me because I’m too tired to deal with the reality of cooking. I ended up eating a protein bar for dinner-a dense, chocolate-flavored brick that contains 23 vitamins I can’t name. I am the problem.
When the format becomes the identity, the species becomes a commodity. And when something becomes a commodity, its history is the first thing to be stripped away. We forget that these fungi have survived ice ages, forest fires, and the rise and fall of empires. They have evolved specific chemical profiles not for our benefit, but as part of an intricate evolutionary dance with their environment.
A Liberty Cap-Psilocybe semilanceata-is a masterpiece of niche adaptation. It loves the damp, acidic grasslands of the Northern Hemisphere. It has a specific relationship with the decaying roots of grasses. When you hold a dried one, you are holding a tiny piece of that specific ecological history.
When you eat a gummy that “contains” it, you are consuming a processed extract that has been divorced from its context. It’s the difference between walking through a forest and looking at a photograph of a tree. Both provide “tree-ness,” but only one offers an encounter.
The Highway of the Ethnobotanical World
I think back to the corridor projects. We spent $473 on a single infrared camera just to see how a specific family of deer moved through a culvert. We cared about their individual patterns. But to the commuters driving on the highway above, those deer don’t exist as individuals.
They are “wildlife,” a generic category that occasionally creates a “traffic event.” The highway is the format; the deer are the species. The highway makes the landscape navigable, but it also makes it invisible. The move toward gummies and capsules is the highway of the ethnobotanical world. It’s fast, it’s smooth, and it gets you where you’re going without the “mess” of the landscape.
But if we only ever stay on the highway, we lose the ability to read the map. We forget how to identify the signs of a healthy ecosystem. We forget that the “magic” isn’t a property of the format; it’s a property of the organism.
The Reductionist Trap: Molecules vs. Narrative
I’ve seen people argue that form factor doesn’t matter because “the molecules are the same.” This is the ultimate reductionist trap. It’s the same logic that says a synthetic diamond is the same as one pulled from the earth, or that a lab-grown burger is the same as a steak. Chemically, perhaps. But the experience of consumption is never just about chemistry. It’s about the narrative of the intake.
If I take a capsule, my body processes it as “medicine.” If I eat a gummy, my body processes it as “treat.” If I consume the dried cap of a specific species, my body-and my mind-is forced to process it as “other.” There is a psychological friction there that is vital. That friction is what creates respect. It’s what reminds us that we are entering into a relationship with a living thing, not just engaging a chemical lever in our brain.
Rachel E.S. called me back while I was still standing in my smoky kitchen. She’d found a 3-foot gap in the fencing that wasn’t on the original blueprints. “It’s a glitch in the format,” she said, sounding almost happy. “The contractor followed the instructions perfectly, but they didn’t account for the way the creek bed shifts after a heavy rain. The land decided it wanted a different delivery mechanism.”
I laughed, looking at my phone screen. I had two tabs open: one for the Liberty Caps and one for a bag of “Fruit Punch Focus” gummies. The gummies were cheaper, faster, and had 3,403 five-star reviews. They were the “correct” choice for a busy wildlife planner with a burned dinner and a deadline.
But then I thought about that bobcat. I thought about the difference between a concrete pipe and a muddy creek bed. I thought about the 13 species of moss I’d seen earlier that day, none of which had a “form factor” other than themselves. We are so obsessed with how we consume that we have forgotten what we consume.
We want the benefits of the natural world without the inconvenience of its presence. We want the fungus without the dirt, the plant without the leaf, and the animal without the fur. But the potency of these things is inextricably linked to their “thing-ness.”
If we continue to let the format dominate the conversation, we will eventually reach a point where we don’t even need the species anymore. We’ll just have the “effect.” We’ll have a world of perfectly calibrated sensations delivered in colorful, shelf-stable cubes, and we will have no idea where they came from or what they were before they were turned into “units.”
I closed the tab with the gummies. I’m not saying there is no place for convenience. I’m not saying that a gummy can’t be a useful tool. But it should never be the primary way we identify the experience. Right now, we are all becoming very, very good at looking at the skin.
I walked over to the window and opened it to let the smoke out. The air outside was cold and smelled of damp earth and rotting leaves-the scent of a world that doesn’t care about my delivery mechanisms. I looked down at my hands, which were still stained with a bit of dirt from the field earlier.
There are 43 types of grass in the corridor I’m mapping. Most people just call it “lawn.” There are hundreds of species of fungi in the woods behind my house. Most people just call them “mushrooms.” We are losing the names of things, and in doing so, we are losing our connection to them.
A Small, Necessary Rebellion
The next time you’re browsing a curated list, look past the texture. Look past the flavor. Look past the neon-pink icon and the “easy-to-swallow” promise. Look for the name of the organism. Look for the species that spent millions of years figuring out how to be exactly what it is. Because once you turn a species into a footnote, it’s only a matter of time before you forget it ever existed at all.
I’m going to go buy some actual onions. I’m going to chop them myself, with a knife that requires my full attention. I’m going to taste the dirt and the sting and the reality of the vegetable. I might even find a species of shallot that I’ve never heard of before. It won’t be as easy as a protein bar, and it might not have 133 positive reviews on a website, but at least I’ll know what I’m eating.
And in a world that is rapidly becoming a collection of generic formats, that feels like a small, necessary rebellion. We owe it to the organisms to remember their names. We owe it to ourselves to remember that we aren’t just consumers of “formats”-we are participants in a biology that is far older and far more complex than any gummy could ever hope to be.
The elk are waiting at the fence. The shallots are waiting in the soil. The species are waiting to be recognized. All we have to do is stop looking at the cube and start looking at the cap.