Imagine a world where the homes  we live in, the clothes we wear,  

and even the sensors in our electronics  weren’t manufactured, but grown. Mycelium,  

the root structure of fungi, is shaking up  everything from sustainable construction to  

meatless bacon. It’s turning agricultural waste  into walls, hemp into compostable packaging,  

and fungal threads into leather that even luxury  brands are eyeing. This mushroom material is  

set to insulate the façade of a 300-unit  housing project in California. And now,  

innovators are swapping out the sensors of robots  for the electrical pulses of living mycelium. So,  

how long until mycelium is just as  ubiquitous as wood, metal, and plastic?

I’m Matt Ferrell. Welcome to Undecided. This video is brought to you by Incogni.

I get requests all the time to follow up  on exciting breakthroughs I covered in  

the past. Y’know, a sort of “Where Are They  Now?” for renewable technologies. And with  

new uses for mushroom mycelium  sprouting up in my newsfeed,  

I toured the farm of the company that pioneered  it all: Ecovative. They walked me through their  

process for turning mushroom roots into  versatile, sustainable materials. But first…

…what even is mycelium?

When we think of mushrooms, we picture Portobello  caps, forest fungi, or maybe Smurfette’s house.  

But these are just the fruiting bodies; the  real magic of mushrooms happens underground.  

Beneath the soil surface, a vast network of  mycelium threads acts as both roots and stomach,  

digesting and absorbing organic matter. These  threads, called hyphae <hi-fee>, are tubular  

structures that intertwine to form a  lightweight, lattice-resembling foam.

Dig into the forest floor, and you’ll find  this white mycelium network weaving through  

dirt and wood, acting as a natural binder.  This ability to “glue” loose materials  

together is what first fascinated Eben Bayer  and Gavin McIntyre, the duo who dreamed up  

the mass farming and use of mycelium as  a self-assembling, sustainable material.

They mixed mycelium with agricultural waste,  like corn stover or hemp hurds, put it in a mold,  

and let nature do its thing. Fueled by plant  matter, mycelium grows to fill the mold,  

forming an all-natural, compostable foam.  This happens fast: in just four days,  

a rigid mycelium structure is ready to be popped  out of the mold, then grown for another two days  

until its surface is coated with a soft,  velvety layer of mycelium. Once it’s baked  

at a low temperature to stop growth, it’s ready  for whatever application its creator thought up.

For Bayer and McIntyre, that was Mushroom  Packaging, the product that launched  

Ecovative into the green economy. Their  packaging has been used by Dell, Steelcase,  

and Emma Watson’s gin brand, with much of  it manufactured under license in the US,  

Europe, and even down under. Today,  the mycelium-based packaging market  

is valued at nearly $85 million. And as  more companies adopt greener packaging,  

it’s projected to grow more than 9%  annually, reaching over $200 million in 2034.

Ecovative’s innovations didn’t stop at packaging.  While touring massive indoor mushroom farms in  

the Netherlands, where mushroom caps  are grown on straw and picked by hand,  

Bayer got the idea to grow mycelium  indoors as giant mushroom slabs.

“I saw rooms like this, these big beds. And I  realized that this was like the most automated,  

scaled mycelium infrastructure on  the planet devoted to growing this  

one very specific mono crop... And  I had the vision… what if we could  

create this biopolymer in our lab at  this scale, at a really low cost?”

This is the mycelium technology I went to see  for myself. It’s a novel mushroom architecture,  

grown from a strain of oyster mushroom plucked  off a tree in Troy, New York. Forget the mulch:  

this is pure mycelium… and it’s  unlocking a whole new realm of  

material possibilities. Looks like the  world might just be Ecovative’s oyster.

They’re calling it AirMycelium.

“This is 12 days worth of  growth… and you can see it,  

this has a nice tissue texture. So this  is like the future of indoor farming.”

That’s Lacey Davidson, who let me pull  off a bit of the mycelium with a glove.

“It’s kind of tacky. That is wild.”

This is low-energy, low-resource farming. Unlike  plants, mushrooms don’t need grow lights. In fact,  

mycelium hates light. It thrives  in the dark on damp sawdust and  

wood chips — upcycling waste into versatile  building blocks. Water use is minimized, too:

“You hydrate the wood chips, more water's  released from the digestion of the wood  

chips. And then while this room's really misty,  we're mostly just recirculating this humid air.”

That moisture-laden air is blown around the indoor  farm to mimic the mist and breeze of a forest.

Once the mycelium reaches a point where  it’s fully matured, but not yet sprouting,  

the giant racks it’s grown on  transform into conveyor belts,  

sliding thick sheets of mycelium right  off the ends for automated harvesting.

On just one acre of land, Ecovative’s  mycelium farm produces three million  

square feet of material each year. That’s nearly  700,000 square meters of mycelium per hectare.

But what’s truly remarkable is AirMycelium’s  versatility. It slices two ways to create  

two totally different products:  leather pants and pocket bacon.

But before we get into the surprisingly  stylish side of mushrooms—yes, leather  

pants are involved—let’s take a quick pause.  While mycelium might be growing out of the dark,  

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you for supporting the channel. Alright. Now back  to those mushroom leather pants. No, seriously.

Slabs of mycelium can be compressed  with rollers and embossed to create  

an all-natural looking leather with the stretch,  drape, and toughness of the real thing. That’s a  

huge win for sustainability, because the  traditional tanning process for cowhide  

is both chemical-heavy and water-intensive.  Ecovative’s Forager leather, on the other hand…

“It gets to skip, like, the nasty parts,  right? Like all the chromes, all the salts,  

all the deputrification, none of that  has to happen, it just instantly goes  

in. And there's other added benefits,  where it's less time in a tumbler,  

doesn't take as long and as much  water, so less energy and less water.”

Mycelium leather is also grown in just nine days  and produces half the emissions of conventional  

leather. It’s cheaper, too, ringing up at just  $0.18-0.28 cents per square meter compared to  

$5.81-6.24 for raw cowhide. And unlike vinyl-  and polyurethane-based pleathers, Forager  

leather is biodegradable. It breaks down like real  leather instead of hanging around like plastic.

Since I last covered Ecovative’s mycelium-based  leather, the company has partnered with Danish  

footwear brand ECCO. Together, they’re  refining the leather-making process to  

produce custom-grown materials for  shoes and accessories. And in 2025,  

Ecovative is scaling up in a big way.  It’s set to commercialize its leather,  

with major brands already lining up — Calvin  Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Veja among them.

Ecovative isn’t the only company  advancing mycelium-based textiles,  

or mycotextiles. MycoWorks, based  in California, is turning Reishi  

mushrooms into luxury leather that’s already  found its way into Hermès handbags. GM even  

explored MycoWorks fabric for several  interior parts, including map pockets,  

of their SOLLEI electric convertible. I guess  that makes mycelium the Cadillac of leathers.

If turning mushrooms into leather wasn’t  surprising enough, Ecovative also found  

a way to make bacon out of mycelium. They call  it MyBacon, or maybe it should be…myceli-yum?  

It’s already on the shelves in over 1,400 stores  and it’s made from thick slabs of AirMycelium.

“It gets harvested, it gets crushed… and then  it goes into a bacon slicer to get sliced.”

If you take strips of AirMycelium,  soak them in a brine of sugar, salt,  

and natural smoke flavor, boil them up, and  add a little coconut oil…then you’ve got  

artificial bacon with a meat-like  texture that fries up in a pan.

That’s exciting, because about the only two things  nutritionists seem to agree on are the benefits  

of eating more plants and less processed  meat. It’s also exciting for the planet,  

as making this bacon uses a lot less  land, water, feedstuff and, well, pigs.

“This growth chamber is one acre of  land. Of all of 'em. Okay. That can  

do a million pounds of MyBacon  annually on one acre of land.”

That’s a million pounds of bacon made  from agricultural waste and water,  

with minimal energy inputs and compostable waste.

But what all lovers of bacon need  to know is that, yes, it passes the  

sizzle test. And on a BLT or burger… I can  say from experience, it tastes fantastic.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. MyBacon is the  fastest-growing plant-based meat in the northeast  

US, selling three times as fast as competitors.  No wonder Ecovative just secured $28 million  

in funding to triple production capacity  and set up an additional farm in Canada.

Later this summer, they’re rolling out a  pulled pork. I got to try it on my visit  

cooked up with barbecue sauce, and it  was surprisingly good: tender, smoky,  

and close enough in texture to the real thing.  I almost forgot it was made from mushrooms.

So we’ve got bacon and leather…what about  packaging materials? It feels strange to  

list those together, yet they’re all  part of the growing list of uses for  

mycelium. A start-up called GOB  in San Francisco, California,  

is turning Ecovative’s sponge-y mycelium  foam into single-use ear plugs. In France,  

Koz is developing surfboards with mycelium cores  and bio-based resins. And in the Netherlands,  

Loop Biotech is growing biodegradable coffins from  local mushroom species and upcycled hemp fibers.

Mycelium is also a powerful sound  dampener, and Mogu, based in Italy,  

is using it to build sustainable acoustic  wall tiles. In the Samorost house — a  

glamping cabin designed by the Czech Technical  University to look like a cluster of parasol  

mushrooms — mycelium wasn’t just cladding for the  interior walls. It served as insulation panels,  

too. Even the stools were grown from  mycelium, which is probably the first  

time I’ve seen literal toadstools  incorporated into interior design.

All this architectural experimentation  is surprising considering that mycelium  

isn’t typically considered for weight-bearing  applications. But when grown the right way,  

with the right agricultural waste,  mycelium bricks can be surprisingly strong.

An initiative called MycoHAB has built a  one-bedroom home in Namibia using bricks  

made with oyster mushroom mycelium and  biomass sourced from invasive encroacher  

bush. The team claims that pressing and  baking these bricks makes them stronger  

than concrete. Their hope is to someday  produce these bricks from local materials  

at a low enough cost to provide fire-retardant  housing for communities that need it most.

We don’t have to wait for “someday” to see homes  constructed with mycelium, though. In 2025,  

a 316-unit affordable housing complex called  The Phoenix is set to open in West Oakland, CA,  

featuring exterior cladding made from  mycelium panels. These 36-foot-long,  

or 11-meter, prefabricated panels are  grown from Ecovative’s mycelium-and-hemp  

blend in giant molds, then encased in a  fiber-reinforced-polymer shell for durability.

The panels will serve as thermal insulation,  cutting energy costs by keeping the building  

cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Mycelium is  also naturally fire-resistant and has impressive  

sound absorption capabilities — perfect for this  housing complex built next to a busy freeway.  

The truffle on top is that the mycelium  cladding is also carbon negative.

You might be wondering how smart it is  to incorporate mold into a building’s  

structure, but this is only the root-like  mycelium. That’s not the fruiting body,  

and definitely not the fungus’ spores.  And once the mycelium is matured,  

it’s baked at a low temperature  to kill and stabilize it.

But what if we didn’t just build  with mycelium? What if we let  

live mycelium do the building? It' an  idea that’s truly out of this world.  

NASA is exploring whether living mycelium  could be brought to the moon, or even Mars,  

to grow a habitat. At the NASA Ames Research  Center in Mountain View, California,  

scientists are exploring whether astronauts could  one day unfold a lightweight frame seeded with  

dormant mycelium, then “Just Add Water” from ice  deposits and wait for the structure to take shape.

Unsurprisingly, pulling this off won’t  be as simple as throwing together some  

cup noodles. To make this work, they’d need  to grow mycelium alongside algae to provide  

oxygen and food for the fungus. And to shield  it from cosmic radiation, NASA plans to use a  

type that produces melanin…basically, mycelium  that can tan. Soon, they’ll be testing whether  

mycelium can grow in low orbit, bringing this  technology closer to the Moon than ever before.

Space isn’t the only frontier for living mycelium.  Here on Earth, scientists are finding wild new  

ways to tap into its natural abilities, like  turning it into living sensors for robots.

At Cornell University in NY, researchers took  advantage of mycelium’s natural aversion to  

light to create a living sensor for biohybrid  robots. They grew king oyster mushroom mycelium  

around an electrode and flashed it with light,  triggering electrical signals within the fungal  

tissue. An electrical interface in the robot  captured those signals and converted them  

into digital information, prompting the robot to  move. The mycelium wasn’t just an on/off switch,  

either: different intensities of light  made the robot speed up, slow down,  

or even shift direction to  move away from the light.

Mycelium is incredibly sensitive to its  environment, detecting not just light,  

but also chemicals, moisture levels, and even  nearby plants. The Cornell team hopes that  

one day, mycelium-based robots might  be used for environmental monitoring.  

The vision is to let biohybrid robots take  cues from the soil to determine just how much  

fertilizer is truly needed, reducing excess  fertilization and therefore chemical runoff.  

We’re talking sustainable agriculture  on top of sustainable construction,  

consumer products and clothing, food  and packaging, all from mycelium.

These humble fungal threads are one of the  most exciting materials to come along in  

decades because they’re grown, not manufactured.  Mycelium materials have the potential to replace  

plastics and foams derived from petroleum. And  when they’re worn out or out of style, they don’t  

clog up landfills for hundreds of years or pollute  our oceans, and us, with microplastics. Instead,  

they break down right into the soil, enriching  it with nutrients that fuel new plant growth.

This is the essence of a circular economy:  products that aren’t just biodegradable,  

but regenerative. Mycelium is part of  a cycle: grown from agricultural waste,  

assembled at room temperature with minimal energy,  

and composted back into the earth when it’s  done. Nothing wasted, everything renewed.

The best part is that mycelium does all this  without sacrificing performance. It makes  

for sturdy foams, resilient leather,  and even pretty convincing carnitas.

But what do you think? Should we swap BLTs  for MLTs? Or do mycelium alternatives psych  

you out? Jump into the comments and let me  know, and be sure to listen to my follow up  

podcast Still TBD where we’ll keep this  conversation going. Thanks as always to  

my patrons for your continued support  and helping to keep the channel going.  

Keep your mind open, stay curious,  and I’ll see you in the next one.

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