The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, September 2013 : In your neighborhood grocery store sits a bin of nondescript white mushrooms, unthreatening and clearly-of-this-planet fungi that might have been plucked from the pages of Beatrix Potter tale. But for accomplished forager and outdoorsman Langdon Cook ( Fat of the Land ), the story goes much deeper. He took a long walk in the woods and returned with The Mushroom Hunters , a collection of delightful stories of a mycelial underground filled with eccentrics and obsessives who at first seem strange (and maybe even unsettling), but grow more charming by the page. This book is a ton of fun--equal parts adventure, natural history, and gastronomy. Naturalists (who aren’t necessarily foodies) will learn about some of the more exotic fungi and their uses on the table, while foodies (who might not be naturalists) will find the loamy details of the mushroom trail enlightening. Above all, The Mushroom Hunters will make you hungry. -- Jon Foro Author Langdon Cook on The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America The idea for The Mushroom Hunters came to me while harvesting morel mushrooms in July, 2007, during an episode that’s briefly recounted in my first book, Fat of the Land . I was in the North Cascades of Washington State near the Canadian border, in one of the last truly wild regions of the Lower 48, home to wolves and grizzlies. A friend and I heard strange voices in the woods. Moments later we came face-to-face with two men, both wearing impossibly large packs filled with morels, maybe eighty pounds apiece. Unlike us, these men were picking mushrooms to sell, spending months in the bush working in abject conditions that would test the meddle of anyone. I had heard that commercial mushroom pickers often packed guns into the woods and guarded patches with territorial vigor. They stared at us and we stared at them. Nothing was said. Then, just like that, they turned on their heels and disappeared back into the timber. It was like a Bigfoot sighting. After that I was determined to infiltrate the commercial wild mushroom trade, a scrappy, mostly hidden and itinerant enterprise that follows the mushroom flushes year-round, with echoes of Wild West frontier-style capitalism and Gold Rush days gone by. I was amazed that no one had ever written a book-length account of it, and was fortunate to meet a number of pickers and buyers who allowed me into their world. Over the next few years I traveled from my home in Seattle as far north as Yukon Territory and, come winter, camped with pickers on the Lost Coast of California. I went to Oregon and British Columbia, to Michigan, Montana, Colorado, and New York City, among other places, to follow the invisible food chain from patch to plate. I got on “the mushroom trail” and embedded myself in a subculture that is, for better or worse, indelibly American. The Mushroom Hunters weaves together food, natural history, and outdoor adventure. It’s the result of thousands of hours spent with pickers, buyers, and chefs; hundreds of hours of taped interviews; and my own compulsion to work this first-hand material into a narrative that readers can appreciate, whether or not they’ve ever tasted a wild mushroom or even taken a walk in the woods. Images by Author Langdon Cook Blond morels for sale in Sisters, Oregon. Click here for a larger image Doug and Jeff scouting chanterelles on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington. Click here for a larger image A picker's payday at matsutake camp, Crescent Lake, Oregon. Click here for a larger image From Booklist With the arrival of spring, North America’s woodlands begin to echo with the footfalls of stealthy and secretive hunters who aren’t after any animal. They are on the prowl for fungi springing from the awakening forest floor. Morel hunters eventually give way to other adepts foraging for later-arriving porcini and chanterelles. These hardy souls then meet up with even more shadowy types, dealers and middlemen, furtive guardians of mushroom supply and demand, who resell their booty to restaurants, greenmarkets, and the export trade. This gray market runs on cash only, and serious players in this secretive society are frequently armed. All this is in service of the fifth taste, umami, a prime flavor that mushrooms supply in such abundance that chefs willingly pay astronomical prices to please themselves and well-heeled guests. Cook’s sketches of these unique and idiosyncratic characters aren’t always wholly sympathetic, but he makes every one of them real. --Mark Knoblauch “A rollicking narrative . . . Cook [delivers] vivid and cinematic scenes on every page.” — The Wall Street Journal “ The Mushroom Hunters lends fresh, sharp illumination to a little-known but vigorously contested patch of gastronomic turf. . . . [It’s an] entertaining ramble through the woods with a group of ragtag characters.” — The Washington Post “Like Susan Orlean in The Orchid Thief, Seattle author [Langdon] Cook shines a light on a shady subculture operating at the seam between wilderness and commerce. Like author Michael Pollan, he knows that every bite of food these days has a complex, often unsavory backstory. Like the late Hunter Thompson, he not only goes along for the ride with the shifty characters he’s writing about, but drives the getaway car. After reading The Mushroom Hunters, you’ll never look at a portobello the same way. . . . [A] beguiling, surprising book.” — The Seattle Times “Not simply about mushrooms, this book examines human behavior, economics, food, society, and nature. In the end, readers will have learned a great deal about U.S. economic and social structures—all while being entertained and enlightened by stories of gastronomy and mushrooms. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal “Intrepid and inspired.” — Publishers Weekly “Uncultivated mushrooms are one of our last truly wild foods; it often takes truly wild and rough mushroom hunters to bring them to our table. Cook travels and hunts with them in a riveting, crazy undertaking, told in often-poetic prose.” — Shelf Awareness “Cook’s sketches of these unique and idiosyncratic characters aren’t always wholly sympathetic, but he makes every one of them real.” — Booklist “If you’ve never thought of using the words ‘mushroom’ and ‘adventure’ in the same sentence, this gripping book will force you to reconsider.” —Bill McKibben, author of Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist “With superb detail and intrepid research, Langdon Cook leads a fascinating trek deep into the mysterious world of mushroom hunting, blending intriguing natural history and quirky characters with insights into this murky, sometimes dangerous business. This is riveting stuff for food lovers.” —Kathleen Flinn, author of The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry “ The Mushroom Hunters is one of those very infrequent and wonderful books that change your way of looking at something you think you don’t care about. Who knew the humble mushroom could be shot through with suspense? The way Langdon Cook writes about these delicious fungi—the excitement in the story of their capture; the flair of the telling—has me convinced I’d go pretty far out on the wire myself to get some.” —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life “A beautifully written portrait of the people who collect and distribute wild mushrooms, The Mushroom Hunters is food and nature writing at its finest. Langdon Cook's descriptions are so visceral you can smell the mushrooms, the forests, the rain on every page. This is a terrific book.” —Eugenia Bone, author of Mycophilia “In these pages, you’ll meet America’s last nomads in all their ragamuffin glory. Langdon Cook brings these individuals to life with the eyes, ears, and heart of a first-rate novelist.” —Lawrence Millman, author of Last Places “The Mushroom Hunters is like the forest itself—gems are hidden throughout. Cook captures the surreal and deeply flavorful world of North America’s wild fungi, the subculture that seeks them, and the thrill of the treasure hunt.” —Jim Robbins, author of The Man Who Planted Trees “In The Mushroom Hunters, Langdon Cook unearths the iconoclastic frontier spirit of the obsessive band of underground foragers he encounters on the wild mushroom trail, including outlaw entrepreneurs, illegal immigrants, scofflaws, tweakers, and star chefs alike. You’ll never look at that matsutake on your dinner plate the same way again.” —Brad Thomas Parsons, James Beard Award–winning author of Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All Langdon Cook is the author of Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager, which The Seattle Times called “lyrical, practical and quixotic.” Cook has been profiled on the Travel Channel , in Bon Appetit, WSJ magazine, Whole Living, and Salon.com, and his writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Sunset, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and Outside . He is also a columnist for Seattle magazine and has been the recipient of many grants and awards. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two children. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1Among the Recreationals...My obsession with fungi arrived like a sickness. It con- u2002sumed me. In the immoderate manner I approach all new pursuits, I read just about every book, online treatise, and marginalia I could find. It seemed to me I had something of a knack for stumbling on good mushroom habitat. Maybe this was because of all the hiking and bushwhacking I had done over the years, or maybe it was my youthful crush on birds that gave me a facility with field characteristics. Driving along the highway near my Seattle home, I would catalog the woods I saw and try to imagine what species lived there. Mushrooms often fruit in connection with a specific type of tree. I studied and memorized these kinships. Initially my wife, Martha, was supportive of my new hobby. Soon, though, to her dismay, I was sneaking out at all hours to scout likely patches. I started bringing home what some might consider unreasonable quantities of fungi—pounds and pounds of chanterelles, shaggy manes, giant puffballs, the list goes on—first to eat fresh, and then in such numbers that I cobbled together a homemade dehydrator, bought a stand-up freezer, and even did some pickling in the Mediterranean tradition. The homemade dryer gave way to a dedicated store-bought model, and my map collection grew into an unwieldy binder full of tattered and footnoted quads. I took my compass and mushroom knife wherever I went, just in case.Ancient Egyptians called mushrooms “the magic food,” with powers of immortality fit only for pharaohs; commoners were forbidden to eat them. In Slavic countries, as far back as anyone can remember, families have gathered beliy grib, the white mushroom, like a crop, as a hedge against hard winters and starvation. In Africa, edible termite mushrooms grow as big as umbrellas, and a single Armillaria fungus spreading across more than two thousand acres of Oregon’s Malheur National Forest is considered the world’s largest organism. Mushrooms have been implicated in the assassination of a Roman emperor and the surrealistic trip down a famous literary rabbit hole. There’s a mushroom that resembles a dead man’s foot and one that looks like a frozen waterfall. Mushrooms are colorful, beguiling, hideous, and transformative.But more than anything, they are thought of as food. Across much of the globe, through the ages, hunting wild mushrooms has been a regular feature of people’s lives, a rite of passage even. “All Russians know the mushrooms, not by dint of study as the mycologists do, but as part of our ancient heritage, imbibed with our mother’s milk,” writes Valentina Pavlovna Wasson in Mushrooms, Russia, and History. A popular Russian nursery rhyme even includes points of mushroom identification. It’s hard to imagine such children’s verse catching on in North America, save for a cautionary tale about deadly blooms in the woods. Yet even here, in the land of fast food and finicky palates, the allure of the wild mushroom is taking root.Parked in front of a white tablecloth in a trendy Manhattan restaurant, a curious diner might pause to wonder how all this came about. Not long ago, on a snowy evening near Central Park, I browsed the menu at one of New York’s finest eateries. The quail came with black trumpets. Shaved truffles sexed up a celery root agnolotti. The garganelli corkscrewed fetchingly in a morel cream sauce. The menu was dotted with calligraphed references to chanterelles and porcini, like little colorful caps poking through the forest duff. The fungi, it turned out, even outnumbered the fish. Such riches would have been unimaginable a generation ago. For a mushroom enthusiast like myself—and an increasing number of home cooks and restaurant patrons around the country who know the fungal difference between a lobster and a hedgehog—this quiet revolution of wild edibles has been a culinary bonanza. More and more, diners are discovering that wild mushrooms can stand on their own and replace traditional parts of a meal, even the meat.My friends tended to view my mushroom compulsion with detached amusement. Even Martha found it hard to fathom. This surprised me because it was Martha who first showed me an edible wild mushroom, in the early days of our courtship, while on a backpacking trip in Olympic National Park. We harvested several pounds of chicken of the woods, a shelf fungus decked out in bright citrus colors, and made an elaborate Italian feast over a camp stove in the wilderness. After this, the domesticated supermarket variety hardly passed muster. For one thing, it’s bland. Selecting mushrooms from a bulk bin—even when they’re periodically updated with new and exotic marketing terms like cremini—can’t begin to match the satisfaction of finding them in the wild. Most people don’t even realize that the Continental-sounding portobello is merely an oversize cremini, both of them being the exact same species, the very domesticated Agaricus bisporus.A quick primer. All mushrooms are fungi, but not all fungi are mushrooms. The kingdom also includes yeasts, rusts, and mildews—even slime molds. It is a mark of fungi’s otherness that we don’t have a proper lexicon with which to discuss them. Though a mushroom is not technically a fruit, we borrow a term from the plant kingdom and refer to its growth as a fruiting. Thus, a mushroom is the fruiting, reproductive body of a fungus, much as a cherry is the reproductive fruit of a cherry tree. The fungus that produces mushrooms usually—though not always—lives underground in the form of thread-like filaments collectively known as the mycelium, a root-like mass of tiny tendrils. When conditions are right, the mycelium produces a mushroom, which contains the fungus’s reproductive material in the form of spores.Mushrooms are the great decomposers and recyclers of the world, and they can be categorized in terms of their survival strategies. Note, again, that they’re not plants. They don’t photosynthesize. Instead, they get their nutrients in one of three ways. Some are parasites, like the lobster mushroom, feeding off other living things, even animals. Others are saprobes, recycling dead organic material (wood, dung, humus) into soil. The rest are said to be mycorrhizal, which means they partner with plants in a mutually beneficial exchange of nutrients. Skilled mushroom hunters know how to exploit the various mushrooms’ survival strategies. They can locate colonies of the parasitic honey mushroom, with its tightly packed clusters of amber-colored caps, by finding the dead trees that are its prey; or they can return to a saprophytic lion’s mane mushroom year after year that fruits out of a lightning-struck hardwood. By far the most abstruse relationship is among the mycorrhizal mushrooms. The mushroom hunter seeking chanterelles must understand which plants and trees the chanterelle requires to live. Knowing the trees of the forest is an essential piece of the puzzle.Only recently has science begun to unravel the mysteries of mushrooms. Turns out, they’re evolutionarily closer to human beings and other members of the animal kingdom than to plants. In other words, fungi and animals share a common relative in the distant past, while plants had already split off the family tree. This commonality between fungi and animals can be seen in chitin, the fibrous substance found in the cell walls of mushrooms and the exoskeletons of arthropods. Fungi have had a profound impact on people and civilizations throughout human history, despite our lack of knowledge. Consider for a moment how baking, brewing, or winemaking would have begun without yeast. Or where we would be without penicillin. In the future we may rely on mushrooms to help clean up oil spills, and the Chernobyl meltdown proved that fungi can mitigate nuclear contamination by literally feeding on radiation. The most obvious use through the centuries, however, can be seen on our dinner tables. Meaty, flavorful, and highly textured, wild mushrooms are a pleasure to cook with and exhibit that sought-after “fifth flavor” popularized in Japan and known as umami, a comforting savoriness that spreads across the palate and coats the tongue, making the diner feel good all over. Many parts of the world have enjoyed long liaisons with fungi, notably Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, much of Asia, and Mesoamerica. North America is largely a mycophobic region, as passed down from an Anglo-Saxon fear of what lurks in the dark woods. But this is changing.Our driver pulled the lever, the door clanked shut, and we lurched out onto Lake Street, a police escort’s flashing blue lights leading the way through the rain-soaked streets of Boyne City, Michigan. The yellow school bus passed a row of tent canopies set up along neat sidewalks, their unlikely wares on display: lawn gnomes for sale, ornately designed walking sticks, and phalanx after phalanx of carved wooden toadstools as tall as toddlers, with little white price tags fluttering in the wind. It was the start of the annual Boyne City National Morel Hunting Contest, and everyone on board this bus hoped to find glory in the nearby woods.I was in the lead bus of five, seated next to a woman named Mary Ellen. Passengers shifted in their seats, making squeaking noises in their rain slickers and plastic pants. A few wore wide-brimmed rain hats and billowing ponchos, even garbage bags. “I’m sizing up the opposition,” Mary Ellen whispered to me as she studied each passenger. “That guy might be worth keeping an eye on.” She pointed a discreet elbow at the seat in front of us, where a stocky man in a camouflage trucker cap was checking a GPS application on his smartphone. After living on both coasts, with years spent in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, where she once worked as a network news radio anchor, Mary Ellen had recently returned to live a more bucolic life in her hometown, and today’s excursion was one of the reasons why. The bus picked up speed. No one on board, save the driver, knew our destination. Secrecy, after all, was paramount.I had come to Boyne City because I have always been drawn to nature’s secrets more than to, say, Hollywood’s secrets or the secrets of Wall Street hedge-fund managers. Nature is real. It exists beyond our ability to create it or even mediate it. When I was young, the mystery of birds kept me up at night. Later, it was anadromous fish, such as salmon and steelhead, swimming upstream on their unknowable migrations. Wildflowers, with their constellations of families and their pouting, O’Keeffean lips, seduced me for a spell. But once the mushrooms grabbed hold, I couldn’t let go. The others got tossed aside and mushrooms became my fondlings, and before long I found myself going to greater and greater lengths—such as today’s morel hunt in a distant state—to satisfy my fungal yearning. This is not to say I wasn’t interested in the human element. In fact, by this point the human xadintersection with the natural world had become something of a xadspecialty of mine. I was most interested in foraging, that age-old knowledge passed down since antiquity that had briefly lost its luster in the glare of whiz-bang modernity and was now being rediscovered all over again. Foraging existed at the crossroads of a few of my favorite pastimes—nature, the outdoors, and food—and foraging for edible mushrooms satisfied my desires like few pursuits could. At the end of the day, birds were just a note in a life list; I could watch them and study them and be enamored of them, yet they remained apart. Mushrooms, however, came home with me. They went into a pan and became a part of me.Morels might be the most widely recognized edible mushrooms in the world. In the Midwest they’re the favorite, bar none. Across much of Europe, morels form a culinary triumvirate with two other celebrated types of wild mushrooms, chanterelles and porcini. Each season, hunters take to the woods to visit old family patches handed down like precious heirlooms. In Asia, morels are foraged in bewildering numbers in the Himalayas, Caucasus, Hindu Kush, and elsewhere, with many of those morels funneling into Istanbul before export, just as art and religion did hundreds of years ago. In North America, quite possibly their point of evolutionary origin, morels signify the beginning of a new year of mushroom hunting. The people who gather them come from long lines of mushroom hunters, including those at the Boyne City contest, many of whom had been picking morels since childhood. “I had some in butter and garlic last night,” bragged a man behind me in a flattop haircut. Everyone on the bus within hearing distance perked up. “They’re popping now in Illinois—big time,” confirmed a woman with a harsh smoker’s voice, grasping an oxygen tank. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be,” lamented another, and everyone nodded solemnly. “You know what?” said a tiny, ancient woman across the aisle as she banged her wooden walking stick on the floor for support, gripping its morel-shaped handle with thin, bloodless fingers. “I don’t even eat the darn things and I can’t get enough of them.” “Sweetie, I’ll take ’em off your hands,” said her seatmate, and they both cackled loudly as the bus rounded a corner and left the last vestiges of town behind. Read more