Musings on Mushrooms
This is the third installment of a series that I’ve been writing with my dad about food and gardening.
The first installment was about growing sprouts, and the second covers edible landscaping.
Mushrooms are a fungal growth that typically take the form of a domed cap on a stalk, with gills on the underside of the cap. Mushrooms have a reputation for being “magic” for many reasons. Mushrooms are known for popping up nearly overnight in natural areas, and their unique structures and textures can really feel like they are something out of a fairy tale.
Some mushrooms are edible, some are poisonous, and some lie somewhere in between, resulting in hallucinations for the eater (sometimes this is encouraged, sometimes this is not…). Foraging mushrooms is practiced by Indigenous groups all over the world, wherever mushrooms grow. There are thousands of edible species in North America alone, and populations that have lived on this land for thousands of years have deep knowledge about which mushrooms nature provides for us to eat, and which ones to avoid. Mushroom foraging has grown in popularity within the local food movement, but many who are foraging are not members of these native groups and have a lot they need to learn before feeling confident in their finds. If you are interested in getting started foraging yourself, we recommend reading this quick guide for safe mushroom foraging.
Mushrooms are also an essential part of our ecosystems, and are vital for recirculating organic matter and nutrients in the natural environment. As foraging grows in popularity there is an increased need to ensure that forests aren’t over-picked by excited local foodies. This is to ensure that there is enough left over to sustain mushroom’s role in the ecosystem, as well as to allow them to continue to be a source of food for those populations who still rely on foraging as part of their native diet and food sovereignty.
Most of the mushrooms we find in the grocery store are farmed, not foraged. You may find some “foraged” mushrooms at a farmers market, but most of those are likely farmed as well. Mushroom farming is much different from that used to cultivate other plants because rather than needing light and warmth, they grow best in the cool darkness. This unique characteristic, in comparison to other products in the produce aisle, has led to some exciting creativity in the field of mushroom farming. Some mushrooms are grown in old mining tunnels, and others in shipping containers, offering a way to go really small-scale and local in some areas. If you’d like to really dive into the magic of mushrooms, this video from Paragraphic, featuring Southwest Mushrooms, is fascinating and shows how mushrooms are grown from start to finish. They do a better job explaining growing mushrooms than we could ever do, so we hope you’ll take a peek!
Mushroom growing, however, does not have to be limited to those who farm on a large scale. Growing mushrooms at home is actually quite easy with the right materials, and there are many places that offer kits to get you started. Looking for Grow-Your-Own kits? Consider supporting this small business and start growing your own hyper-local mushrooms at home!
Beyond the science of how mushrooms grow and their fantastic nutrition benefits, mushrooms can be a lens through which to view the world. My dad and I love to talk about food and culture, and how much our food system has changed along with our societal norms over time. Below you’ll find a personal essay from my history-nerd father who has spent his life in academia, but has always had a deep fascination with mushrooms and the magic they hold.
Growing-up in suburban Chicago in the late 60s, I had never really heard of mushrooms outside of fairy tales. As a family, we would all get grumpy if my mom accidentally bought the mushroom flavored Ragu instead of the regular kind. That unfamiliar flavor would ruin an entire Spaghetti Night Tuesday!
But then things suddenly changed. At twelve, my family and I moved to Sacramento, California. Some ex-actor Ronald Reagan was governor, but the state beamed in the afterglow of the 1960s. Enthusiasm was in the air, and the vegetable aisles were full of all sorts of new delights for our family—artichokes, kiwis, sweet-potatoes, new lettuces, and of course a wide variety of mushrooms.
As a teen, I first started to eat mushrooms on pizza, and usually with a beer. My mother was never much of a cook beyond the can opener, but she began, tentatively, to venture into slicing a few champignons into a salad—which we four children meticulously avoided. Frozen peas were still the closest to a "fresh vegetable" as we would get, apart from the same old iceberg lettuce, and always accompanied by a ketchup and mayo dressing.
Then, I went off to college in the Bay Area. All of a sudden there was Alice Waters and her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, the Greens and Moosewood cookbooks, and the entire culinary explosion of California's Napa Valley—and the words "organic" and "sustainable", which were uttered by a chosen few, albeit softly. A revolution was afoot, one that we now too-often take for granted with the network of farmers markets, or even the ability to buy a "McPlant” at McDonald’s. Mushrooms took the frontline in this same revolution. The variety of mushrooms in stores today dwarfs the choices available just ten years ago, much less those in the 1980s.
Moving to West Berlin in my early twenties taught me to appreciate cooking with mushrooms. As a twenty-something philosophy student with long hair and a beard, I fell into the vegetarian squatter scene of West Berlin of the 1980s. Because my communal roommates were vegetarian, we all cooked vegetarian. Two members of the household tried a macrobiotic, or “locavore”, diet, where they only ate food grown within 50 miles, which was close to a death sentence in the isolated island of West Berlin. But nevertheless, I cooked, and mushrooms became the mainstay of all my sauces and soups. Only mushrooms could provide a depth of flavor similar to beef or pork—after all, eating a stuffed Portabello is like eating a steak. I’m convinced that cooking with meat has hidden dark secrets and laziness in cuisines for ten-thousand years! My subsequent years as a vegetarian cooking with mushrooms taught me how to create even more flavor and depth. Now, I eat red meat too, but my mushrooms are still my partners in the crime!
A Native-American student of mine at Stanford in the late 1980s taught me the greatest mushroom wisdom of my life. At the time, I ran a small, interdisciplinary and residential college. A female member of a northern plains tribe, the first ever in our program, came to inform me that she was returning to Montana for two weeks in the middle of the academic quarter to help with the tribe's mushroom harvest. I immediately launched into some white-male, liberal argument about needing to set priorities and stay on campus for classes, or some other patriarchal bullshit. She looked back at me with eyes I will never forget...not pity, but a sadness for me that I just couldn't understand her position—I simply did not yet have the tools. She left for her two weeks, but it took me two decades to realize my own lesson.
The Pacific Northwest is the wet paradise for fungus of all kinds. Mushrooms in a dozen varieties literally choke my garden in Portland, Oregon after the autumn rains and the first major leaves fall. It rains here constantly, not a lot, but constantly. With climate change, it has only become wetter and warmer in Portland, and the mushrooms love it. "Plants grow by the light of the sun, mushrooms by the light of the moon." Fungus in the soil during the fall and winter means you are managing your garden correctly. This means that decomposition and the natural nitrogen cycle is afoot. The mushrooms themselves are, of course, only the small above-ground delights of a massive underground thriving organic network. But fungi of all sorts populate the lawn and beds of cultivated gardens and forest floors by the thousands. They are the stars of this season of change, before berries and barks take center stage. And with new laws in the state of Oregon, mushrooms are indeed in fashion!
(I will at this point in the essay, for my daughter's sake, omit my experiences with magic mushrooms!)
Certainly, in this shit-show of a year, we must remember the fires that ravaged the West Coast, at a scale almost unimaginable to people in our Eastern states. The vastness of the wildfires of 2020 are scarcely imaginable to us who confront the expanse of the West on a daily basis. But burned areas make good habitat for mushrooms. A positive spin on our failure to cope with the wildland-urban interface that is increasing our wildfire risk! Should be some great mushrooms here for the foreseeable future.
No, I never have collected and nor never will I harvest my own mushrooms, as Michael Pollan boldly does in The Omnivore's Dilemma, and countless others do around the world. While I wish I’d been more encouraging with my student in the 1980s, the risk to reward is still simply too high for my untrained eyes. My layman’s advice here could be tantamount to murder—and even perhaps the end of a career for an up-and-coming young plant scientist from Cornell, like my daughter. Unless you’re planning on doing a lot of learning about what to eat (and what not to!) I’d recommend just going to your local farmers market and enjoying the variety and bounty of this curious season!
This piece is part of a series of articles that Hannah and her dad are writing together to stay connected through quarantine and beyond. Interested in reading more from them? Read about how to grow your own sprouts at home and about edible landscaping in their other articles on Grounded Grub.
