Fungi Fan Clubs Mushrooming Across the U.S.

Dennis Desjardin tenderly plucks a delicate brown cupped mushroom, small enough to be Tom Thumb’s goblet, that is growing in the debris of a soggy field of young corn lilies.

“Isn’t that fantastic?” says Desjardin, pinching the stem of the dripping little fungus in the high Sierra sunlight. “They’re so charismatic, how could you not love them?”

The inconspicuous little mushroom Desjardin is holding is yet another new discovery. To date, the San Francisco State University mycologist -- a rock star in the world of mushrooms -- has identified, named and published 150 new species, and he has collected and identified hundreds more that he still needs to write up.

That leaves at least 2 million unnamed species to go: More than 95% of fungi have yet to be classified, described and named in scientific journals.

On this June morning, Desjardin and a few dozen mushroom lovers are sploshing through the snowmelt, 6,500 feet up in California’s Sierra Nevada, collecting species.

Some, including a slimy fungus (“which looks like last night’s bowl of chocolate mousse”), creep around the forest floor and can be carefully examined and identified. Others, like the ridged and pitted morels (considered among the most delicious wild mushrooms in North America), can be fried up with butter, salt and pepper for an evening feast.

As exciting as the new discoveries are, many students intend to find edibles on this foray as well -- despite the risk of consuming poisonous varieties. As mushrooms’ popularity grows, so do incidents of poisoning, according to Michael Beug, chairman of the North American Mycological Assn. Toxicology Committee.

Last year, 148 cases of poisonings and three deaths were reported. In 2002 and 2003 combined, poisonings numbered 91, and one of them was fatal.

Danger aside, wild mushrooms -- long appreciated in Europe and Asia -- are enjoying an ascent from freaky fungus to gourmet delight and scientific mystery.

“What’s not to enjoy about wild mushroom hunting?” says North American Mycological Assn. President Ike Forester. “Sometimes you find a bounty of culinary prizes, high priced in the gourmet shops, and dinner can be an unbelievable experience.”

Once you start looking for mushrooms, you see them everywhere -- poking their little brown caps through melting patches of snow, clustering in thick patches in a moist meadow, globbing out of a dead log like a lump of bread dough.

Fungiphiles -- armed with wicker baskets and wax paper bags -- hunt, collect, eat, photograph and admire mushrooms.

They also like to join clubs, which are popping up around the country like mushrooms after a warm rain.

Of more than 75 local mushroom clubs in the United States, about a dozen are new, and more established clubs are also welcoming a bounty of new members. In the last two years the Oregon Mycological Society, for example, has gone from 300 to 600 members, all salivating for their next porcini.

“There’s a lot of new interest, because people are getting exposed to wild mushrooms a lot more. They see them in restaurants, grocery stores, on cooking shows, and they realize they can find them in the woods,” said Forester, who works as an accountant in North Wilkesboro, N.C., when he’s not volunteering for the Mycological Assn.

Most clubs cost $10 to $25 a year to join. For this, members usually get to join club events, receive a local newsletter and, perhaps best of all, access a mushroom hot line, where they can speak or even meet with an expert to confirm the safety of their bounty before they saute it with their pasta. The value, members say, is in the camaraderie and the mushrooms.

“At $30 per pound, it often pays to find your own for free,” said Mary Woehrel, who founded the Mushroom Club of Georgia 18 months ago. Today her Atlanta-based club has 75 members who go on forays, swap recipes, attend lectures and promote cultivation.

Woehrel is fascinated by fungi.

“They’re beautiful, they come up overnight, and they do mysterious and magical things,” she said. “I used to be into wildflowers, but once I started learning about mushrooms, I never looked back.”

She also loves to eat them, especially so-called chicken-of-the-woods mushroom (Laetiporus sulfureus), a light-yellow flat fungus. Nibble it raw and it tastes kind of sour. But sauteed in butter with onions, it tastes astonishingly similar to chicken.

Mushroom treats are all the more delightful, hunters say, when you find them yourself.

Unlike flowers, say, or seashells, you don’t exactly “gather” mushrooms. You hunt for them like Easter eggs.

“I know I’m going to sound like a merry fairy, but you’ll be in the woods and they literally will call you,” said Nova Kim, who with her partner, Leslie Hook, makes a living as a “wild crafter” in northern Vermont, gathering more than 150 different species of mushrooms and selling them to restaurants for $15 to $30 a pound.

Crafting, or commercial mushroom hunting, has gone from a cottage industry to a major, mostly unregulated, agricultural business over the last 10 years. In the Pacific Northwest, experts estimate that more than 10 million pounds -- more than $100 million worth -- of morels, chanterelles, matsutakes, boletes and other mushrooms are sold each year at roadside stands, in restaurants and to professional dealers who jet them over to Japan, where they sell for 50 times the local prices.

Hook’s personal favorite is small and sweet, a tender little morsel she has nicknamed the Snow Shrimp due to its somewhat unfriendly botanical name. (“Would you want to eat something called Entoloma abortivum?” she asks.) On the ground, it looks like a puff of cotton, but when you cut into it, it has salmon veining and feels kind of springy. The taste is complex, almost ambrosial.

“I’m passionate about all plants -- animals, too. I don’t know about people. I guess I’m passionate about some people. Mushrooms, well, I really do love them,” she said.

But not everyone admires mushrooms.

“You see evidence of hostility, a fear of mushrooms. ... If you go to a park, it’s very common to find a mushroom kicked over. No one would ever think of kicking over a flower,” said Dr. Manny Salzman, a retired radiologist in Denver who founded the still vibrant Telluride Mushroom Festival 25 years ago.

Fear may arise from the danger associated with certain varieties.

The most common culprit is the highly poisonous Death Cap, a light, thick mushroom whose cap color, size and stalk are almost identical to those of the delicious and ubiquitous Paddy-Straw mushroom. The Paddy-Straw is eaten regularly in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, and about half of U.S. poisoning victims are from Southeast Asia.

One way to tell them apart, experts say, is to check the spore print: Place the mushroom cap, gills downward, on a piece of paper overnight. The smudge left behind for a Paddy-Straw is pink, while the Death Cap’s spore print is white.

The most sophisticated mushroom hunters study small differences closely, photographing or painting their finds, hoping perhaps to find a new species.

“Wild mushrooms are fascinating because they are so different from any of the other life-forms with which we are familiar,” said Damian Pieper, president of the Iowa City, Iowa-based Prairie State Mushroom Club. Citing an estimate that more than 2,000 different kinds grow in his state alone, he said: “No one knows how many more may be discovered in the years ahead.”

An outstanding day of mushrooming for Jay Justice, who helps run the Arkansas Mycological Society in Little Rock, is when he finds a pristine blue or green fungus.

“My thrill is in identifying them,” said Justice, an epidemiologist for the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality. “But I like to eat them too.”