Disgusted of South Gloucestershire writes:
How about that there National Trust, then? They’ve gone woke, they’re politically correct … er … er … and now they’ve only gone and banished the mushroom by “taking mushrooms off the menu in most of its 300 cafes and restaurants,” as the Daily Mail puts it, “putting thousands of jobs at risk.” You can just imagine furious Mail readers frothing at the mouth, but is this actually true? Of course not.
In classic culture wars style, the Hate Mail has, I suspect, deliberately conflated two different groups in order to encourage anger among the hard of thinking. At the heart of the story is a campaign by the Wildlife Trusts, not the National Trust, to ban Peat extraction. You see, Peatlands store carbon and are important for flood control. They also create wildlife habitat. When peat is extracted, peat areas are permanently damaged. This isn’t even controversial because it’s true, but never let mere facts get in the way of a story. And anyway, the National Trust has not banished mushrooms from its menus. This is what its CEO Celia Richardson says: “We have not banned mushrooms, nor are we boycotting any fungi. We don’t sell anything grown in peat, but the rest of it is – hallucinatory.”
Weirdly, the Mail which is essentially a mouthpiece for the Conservative party, with its gaggle of client ‘journalists’ and columnists, is in this instance arguing in a roundabout way against the Conservative government. Peat grown products grown by professional growers will be banned from 2026, although there is an exemption for mushroom growers until 2030. All the National Trust is doing is getting its mushroom house in order before government rules are changed. You would have thought the Mail would be in full support of them and their forward thinking but stoking up anger gets them more clicks and that is all they care about.
One typical Mail reader writes, obviously anonymously, that. “As I now boycott the National Trust, because of its woke and PC policies, I won’t be affected by this. I get my mushrooms from a local supplier, who grows them on peat.” All I can say is that many Mail readers are like Mushrooms, basically fed shit and kept in the dark. And never forget that being ‘woke’ is actually a very good thing, even though the National Trust itself rightly keeps itself distant from right wing culture wars. The National Trust is the best of Britain. No wonder the Mail hates it.
