Mycophilia, p.15
Mycophilia, page 15
Thirty days after the spawn has been mixed into the compost beds, the first flush (also known as a break) occurs and is picked. Two more flushes follow. Each flush is less aggressive than the previous one as the nutrition in the substrate becomes depleted. As a result, there is less competition among the crimini for space in the beds. But that is a good thing, because it creates the room necessary for some of the crimini to develop into the wide-capped portobello.
All mushrooms have their own specific needs in order to fruit, and the challenge for mushroom growers who are producing more than one genus of mushroom is ensuring that, beyond the perennial issues of pathogen-free spawn and substrate, they provide the right environment for each. Enoki like it cold, around 47 degrees Fahrenheit, and grow in bottles; shiitake like it warm, about 67 degrees; maitake like it supermisty—so much so that when I gazed into the maitake room, it was almost impossible to make out the hushed, feathery mushrooms through the warm fog.
My personal experience with mushroom growing is limited to a steamy bag of oyster spawn-inoculated straw that we made at SOMA camp in Sonoma, California. I traveled back to New York with my plastic bag of inoculated straw in my carry-on luggage. It was surprising how much warmth the straw kit generated. My whole duffel was heating up like a menopausal woman, and the smell, when I opened the overhead compartment to retrieve my bag, was strong enough to cause me to glance sideways at my fellow travelers: a kind of hot, sweaty smell—not a foul odor, but a sublimely living one, like a vegetable version of the smell of skin under a Band-Aid. As it wasn’t something I could explain with a glance and a shrug, I kept my head low and exited the plane as quickly as possible.
At home I was challenged with where to house my kit. I live in an old loft building, where a system of overhead steam pipes creates a dry, hot environment, especially in the winter, and oyster mushrooms like cool, wet places. I ended up placing my kit in the broom closet on top of the water heater and gave it a periodic spritz from the sprayer I use to dampen the ironing. It only took a couple of days for the bag to become very hard—like a roll of toilet paper—and white with growing mycelium. Then, about a week later, the heads of tiny mushrooms appeared through the holes I’d stabbed all over the bag; little bouquets like white-headed craft pins with a lovely, clean mushroomy smell.
My oyster log developed tiny primordia (baby mushrooms) in the cuts in the plastic. A few began to form under the plastic, and I liberated them with an X-Acto knife. The smell was marvelous, clean, and woodsy. I also enlarged some of the other slits, as per the instruction page I was sent home with. Then I moved the log to a table near my west-facing windows. I created a rather unstable tripod by sticking some Chinese take-out chopsticks into the bag, as air is supposed to circulate around it, and misted as frequently as I could remember to. Within about a week, the primordia darkened to a pale gray and sprouted beautiful oyster mushrooms about the size of quarters.
My oyster mushrooms continued to enlarge over the next week, but something was wrong with them: They began to warp, twisting in on themselves in a kind of slow-mo torture. My teenage children advised me many times that the mushrooms looked repulsive, and indeed they did. I thought it had something to do with the light, or the fact that my chopstick tripod kept falling over, or that the cat had become infatuated with the log and had taken to jumping on the table and rubbing her whiskers against it. Anyway, after about 9 days the log began to smell very nasty, like a large, dead insect. It started to embarrass the teenagers (what doesn’t?), and even my husband, who generally encourages home projects like sauerkraut and yogurt making, suggested my oyster log was stinking up the house. It became clear that the mushrooms were putrid and unharvestable. Indeed, when I took it in the elevator to dispose of, one of my neighbors, who joined me on the way down, glanced surreptitiously at my malodorous bag. I pretended to smell nothing, which is the usual protocol in New York when you are caught with garbage that should have been tossed days before. It turns out, of course, that my oyster log had become infected with something.
When there is a glitch in the system—a microscopic bit of contamination gets into the substrate, for example—disaster can hit, as it did for Phillips a couple of days after I visited the farm. A routine food safety quality assurance test revealed the presence of the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes, which can cause food poisoning. Listeria is widespread in nature—but out in the wild it faces competitors that restrain it. In the enoki rooms, it is too cold for many of those competitors to survive, and Listeria, which likes cold temperatures, can thrive unchecked. Phillips voluntarily recalled 7,000 pounds of enoki mushrooms that had been distributed around the East Coast, discarded 300,000 fruiting bottles, shelled out over $50,000 to clean up the enoki house, lost up to 3 months’ worth of production, and ended up ditching the whole enoki operation. In the end, nobody reported getting sick.
Enoki grown in jars
When Phillips started to diversify their mushroom production in 1980, they were the first in the country to do so on a commercial level, and shiitake mushrooms were key to that diversification. Shiitake are prized in Asia for both their mild, nutty flavor and medicinal properties, but Americans didn’t get to taste them fresh until after 1972 because the USDA used to quarantine shiitake spawn imports. It seems the agency had confused the shiitake’s Latin name—Lentinula edodes—with the Latin name of a fungus that attacks railroad ties, Lentinus lepidius.* Today, shiitake constitutes 2 percent of the American mushroom market. Shiitake are wood decayers in nature and can be grown outdoors on logs, but that technique is not economically viable on a large scale.
For a millennium, the Japanese collected shiitake in the wild. The fungus grows on the dead wood of shii trees—an evergreen related to oak, and hence the name: Shiitake means mushroom of the shii tree. By 1943, the Japanese had figured out how to make spawn plugs by inoculating wood chips and inserting them into holes cut in shii logs. Some shiitake growers bang on their inoculated logs in order to stimulate fruiting. Shiitake fruits on a fallen branch because once the branch is off the tree, the food supply for the fungus is suddenly restricted. It’s possible that banging on inoculated logs simulates the moment in nature when the branch falls to the ground, which is maybe a signal of some sort to the mycelium. (I couldn’t find anyone who thought much of this idea. I realize I am kind of assigning consciousness to a fungus. But this is what happens when you become a mycophile. You think the mushrooms are listening.)
After many failed attempts, Phillips, in conjunction with Lambert Spawn, developed a sawdust bag for growing shiitake mushrooms.* The spawn is mixed with a combination of sawdust, wheat bran, millet, or rye grain; chalk; and water in gallon plastic bags. In a matter of weeks, the mycelium grows and binds the substrate in a kind of log that is dense but light, sort of like peat. These logs are removed from the bag and allowed to harden for a couple of weeks, then soaked in water. Within a matter of days, pins begin to form and push their way through the “bark,” and eventually the mushrooms mature, up to 2 pounds per bag. Phillips produces 7,500 shiitake bags a day, 6 days a week. They call the bags logs, a reference to the traditional method of cultivation. The shiitake house is an eerie, misty place, where 10,000 logs covered with mushrooms sit on shelves that climb to the ceiling eight levels high. It was uncanny. The place felt more like an animal mill than a plant nursery. There was something almost conscious about all those mushrooms. They emitted a keen life force, like a very ancient tree that has been around long enough to gain some sentience.
Megaproducers like Phillips are not the only game in town. There are a host of other producers, from businesses like Fungi Perfecti, which, among other ventures, grows medicinal mushrooms like turkey tail for processing into supplements, to monks selling oyster mushrooms grown in their monastery in Charleston, South Carolina; from BTTR Ventures, a company in Berkeley, California, that sells shiitake growing kits on spent coffee grounds supplied by a local roastery, to subsistence farmers like Open Minded Organics on the east end of Long Island, New York.
David Falkowski, in his mid-thirties, wears one gigantic knit hat to hold his copious dreadlocks off his face. He is a third-generation farmer in Bridgehampton—a meaty, handsome Polish American. His grandfather planted row crops, his father planted landscaping trees, and, since 2003, Falkowski has taken over the farming of this 10-acre piece of family land. The setting is pristine. The rich alluvial soil is 12 feet thick in places, and the weather is moderated by the Atlantic Ocean less than 5 miles to the south. Typical of the ritzy Hamptons, Open Minded Organics is hemmed in on all sides by huge, bonus-financed mansions. In the flat landscape, they look like stranded, shingled ocean liners.
Falkowski farms yellow and blue oyster mushrooms, shiitake, and sometimes royal trumpet mushrooms. “I got my start from Paul Stamets’s workshop on mushroom cultivation. I was very interested in the idea of a specialty market that had a healing form to farming. We use organic byproducts [like straw] and turn it into food and compost.” The spent compost from his mushroom operation goes onto the fields, which he is slowly transforming from a tree farm back to row crops. As of 2009, his mushroom business has been self-sustaining, but the challenges are great. As a boutique business, he’s had to work hard at marketing; he’s contracted respiratory illness from the spores; and there is always the threat of catastrophic contamination from molds or pests.
Even though Falkowski’s growing room is significantly smaller and lower tech than Phillips’s, the space is filled with the unmistakable sentience of mushrooms. Four-foot-tall bags of oyster mushroom substrate colonized with mycelium (Falkowski makes his own spawn in the attic of his farmhouse) hang from steel bars like clear punching bags filled with clotted cream. I noticed that “love” was written on each bag. “It’s from The Hidden Messages in Water,” said Falkowski, sheepishly scratching his dread cap. “Since mushrooms are 90 percent water, we think it makes them happier.”*
Spawn makers are busy creating cultures from an ever-widening variety of saprophytic mushrooms. Morels, which can be saprophytic in lifestyle, have been grown successfully, though on a limited scale and with diminished flavor. Morels are difficult to grow because they have a kind of extra stage in their life cycle. Before its fruiting stage, morel mycelium forms a sclerotium, a bulblike fungal mass that is capable of surviving tough natural conditions like a cold winter and forest fires. In the spring, the morel sclerotium forms new mycelium that may form a mushroom. A collection of circumstances are necessary for the mycelium to produce a mushroom—temperature, moisture, carbon dioxide quantities, nutrition in the soil—and to make it more complicated, those circumstances change as the mushroom grows. It turns out it is easier to get the sclerotium to produce mycelium than mushrooms. Indeed, morel mycelium can survive in the sclerotium/mycelium cycle for decades without producing a mushroom, and as mentioned earlier, their preferred habitat is very hard to pin down. According to Tom Volk, there are scientific reports on success with growing morels as early as 1883. But Ronald D. Ower, a San Francisco State University master’s student, is credited with producing the first cultivated morels in a “walk-in growth chamber” (although there are also tales that he grew morels in a box in his San Francisco kitchen). He published his results in Mycologia in 1982. Ower discovered that the sclerotium doesn’t develop unless the nutrients in its environment have become depleted, so he needed to start the mycelium in nutrient-poor soil, surrounded by rich soil. The mycelium quickly consumed the nutrients in the poor soil, and then went after the nutrient-rich substrate. This stimulated the formation of the sclerotium, whose job it is to retain nutrients for wintering over. With correct temperature and high yields of water (simulating spring rains), the sclerotium produced mycelium that formed primordia, baby morels.
Ower went on to develop protocols for cultivating morels with two Michigan State University scientists, Gary L. Mills and James A. Malachowski. The technique, to put it simply, consisted of the following steps: 1) Produce a spawn culture of the morel. 2) Mix the spawn culture in a nutrient-poor soil that is laid on top of or near nutrient-rich soil. 3) Water well. The species they cultivated was later identified as Morchella rufob-runnea, common to California, which some people think are bland in comparison to other morel species.
Ower and his partners received funding from the Neogen Corporation, a Lansing, Michigan, company founded by the nonprofit Michigan State University Foundation as a vehicle to exploit innovations emanating from the school.* Neogen was assigned a patent for the Ower, Mills, and Malachowski technique in 1986. (The scientists were the inventors, but as employees of Neogen, not owners of the technology.) Tragically, Ower never got to see the fruits of his discovery. He was murdered in San Francisco in a gay-bashing incident a few weeks before the patent was granted.
Gary Mills’ morels
Ultimately, Neogen was assigned three patents for growing morels. The morel-growing patents and technology were resold a few times over the next 8 years, and each company that owned an interest had a go at growing morels for sale. Domino’s Pizza was in the game for a while, as they were interested in developing a morel topping for pizza, and Terry Farms, a grower of button mushrooms, invested millions—with help from the city of Auburn, Alabama—in the first commercial morel cultivation plant. Terry Farms grew and sold morels for about 5 years. At its peak, they produced 1,300 to 1,400 pounds a week, but it wasn’t a profitable venture, and by 1999 the plant was abandoned. When Mills went to check on the farm 4 years later, it was gutted of all its equipment.
Although the patents have expired, according to the Mushroom Growers’ Newsletter, no one has been able to produce morels by the instructions. “I don’t know why people can’t figure it out,” said Gary Mills from his office at Diversified Natural Products, an industrial biotechnology company in Scottville, Michigan. “It’s snowing outside and we are harvesting morels right now.”
As far as Gary Mills knows, no one else is producing morels commercially (his cultivated morels can be found on the Internet: Chris Matherly in Georgia sells them through his Morel Mushroom Hunting Club). Otherwise, hopeful home cultivators can buy morel cultivation kits with ready-to-go spawn or inoculated trees. In 2005, Stewart C. Miller patented a process for inoculating seedlings with morel mycelium, a process by which the mycelium is allowed to produce sclerotium and then the seedling is killed to induce the sclerotium to fruit.
Based on the failure of my oyster log, I think I am pretty unlikely to get into any more mushroom cultivation projects; however, the mycologist Mark Miller told me that if I ever wanted to grow morels, he’d send me all the spawn I needed.
“Rake it in some ashes from the fireplace and you might get them—I’ve done it by accident.”
* * *
*Lentinus lepidius owns some of the blame for the South’s defeat during the Civil War. In her book Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles, Lucy Kavaler reported that many of the trains sent to support General Robert E. Lee’s troops never made it due to rotten railroad ties.
*At one time, all shiitake spawn grown in bags of sawdust (versus on wood logs) in the United States came from a single strain that originated on an outdoor shiitake farm in Virginia and was cultured by the mycologist Mark Miller, Lambert’s spawn maker, though lots of other strains have been imported since then.
*The Hidden Messages in Water is a book of photographs of frozen water crystals by Masaru Emoto. Emoto claims the crystals are ugly or beautiful depending on the words or thoughts that were directed at the droplets before they are frozen. His claims have been endorsed (Yoko Ono) and challenged (most notably by Kristopher Setchfield of Castleton State College). To my mind, Emoto’s ideas are cool but kooky. On the other hand, what’s not to like about writing “love” on every bag of mushrooms you grow?
*Neogen developed Agri-Screen, an inexpensive diagnostic kit to screen grain used in animal feed for the carcinogen aflatoxin—a mycotoxin caused by a fungus.
Chapter 6
TRUFFLES
Mycorrhizal species are the holy grail of mushroom cultivation: the porcini and chanterelle, neither of which has been successfully cultivated, and the truffle, which has been cultivated to a limited extent. Unlike mushroom farmers who are growing saprophytes, the challenge of mycorrhizal fungi farmers, or, in most cases, hopeful or potential mycorrhizal mushroom farmers, is to create a living ecosystem. “It’s really terraforming,” said David Falkowski of Open Minded Organics. That’s not an easy task, because living ecosystems are very complex—as any aquarium or zookeeper will tell you. You can go into business hoping to recreate an ecosystem, but the chances that you know everything you need to succeed, especially about these microscopic systems, is pretty slim. Nonetheless, there is a cadre of American truffle growers out there, planting truffle groves and orchards and trying to coax nature into producing the most coveted foodstuff in the world.
Years ago, I went to Tuscany with my parents to truffle hunt for the Tuber magnatum pico, the white truffle, with my father’s cousin Mario. A retired barber, Mario and his cronies, all grandpas with perennially sunburned necks, spend their days in November trespassing on private property with their little truffle hunting dogs called lagatti, checking the spots under scrubby willow that the men in their families have checked for generations. The tartufatti found quite a few white truffles that foggy morning and gave a small one to my father. It looked like a tiny hepatic turd, but the smell! As soon as the dog scratched up the truffle from its hiding place in the earth, the immediate area was flooded with an intoxicating aroma: intensely pleasurable, gamey, and sweet, like the smell of a lover. My father kept the truffle in the breast pocket of his aging leather bomber jacket, and throughout dinner that evening in Florence he kept opening his jacket to sniff. Indeed, as we crossed the Ponte Vecchio on the way back to our hotel, my father stopped a pair of tourists from Wisconsin. “You wanna smell something special?” he said, opening the flap of his jacket. “Smell this!” He demanded. “Come on, SMELL IT!”
