Here's Why Button Mushrooms Are White

I’m surprised by a lot of seemingly ordinary facts, like why sleeve buttons exist and what the “most complex” word in the English language is considered to be.

So you’d best believe I’m a regular peruser of Reddit’s r/todayilearned (TIL) , where netizens share the mildly interesting scraps of trivia they, well... learned, today.

For site user u/amateurfunk , a recent example involved the colour of button mushrooms (also known as “ champignon mushrooms ”).

“TIL that champignon mushrooms were originally all light brown in colour,” they wrote.

But is that true?

Why are button mushrooms white?

According to the Mycological Society of San Francisco (MSSF) , yup, the common mushroom (sometimes called a “white button” variety) actually used to be brown.

The species was first gro