It seems when looking through our retrospectacles, 2023 all but came and went in a flash, and yet, when we look back, we are astounded at all of things we did and places we visited!

In January, we launched our most ambitious adventure schedule yet, with five mushroom adventures in Oaxaca, and co-creating the now legendary NAMA_MX23, a North American Mycologist joint project that was even beyond expectation in how beautiful of an experience it was. Zack also traveled to Oregon and California for the annual SOMA Mushroom Camp (he is leaving Oaxaca in a week to repeat the trip this year!).

In February, we hosted a couple private tours around Oaxaca for some lovely folks and worked in our garden and on landscaping of our rented piece of heaven here; and in March, we took two weeks, completed a weekend course on Syntropic Agroforestry on the coast of Oaxaca, and drove all around Chiapas to the border of Guatamala for Kim’s 40th birthday!

In April, we left Oaxaca for a month, where Zack was Best Man in a wedding in San Diego, and then celebrated his birthday in the Hawaiian Islands!

We (finally!) contracted COVID in late May, likely our return flight—which didn’t stop Zack from finding the early season mushrooms—the only possible time in our busy summer we could have caught it! That was lucky! In June, Kim successfully ran her first Artisan Textile Intensive, an 11-day embroidery immersive with masters and teachers from all over Oaxaca!

In July it was on… and through the end of September, we successfully ran our six mushrooms trips in a blur of rain and mycelium, mycologists and new friends, profound depth and incredible adventures. Wow is all we can say, let’s do it again!

Just as that ended in late September we were off to Atlanta, GA for Kim’s mother’s 70th, where we were also blessed with mushrooms, family and time with the numerous nieces and nephews.

We returned for a shortened month of October before launching ourselves on a 6-week road trip in our faithful Betty White that took us through eight Mexican States and eight states in the US. That was a wild ride… we saw so much family and so many friends, we dipped in hotsprings, we found copious mushrooms, and we brought back to Oaxaca the rest of our stuff from storage in Portland… some of which had been in boxes since pre-pandemic!

In December, Zack restarted his Sourdough Experimentation and suddenly we are swimming in Bagels as good as any we have had. We never knew a bagel could be used as currency, but we’ve never lived in a  bagel desert before!

After being so exhausted in 2022 from our wedding, we had a rather restful and quiet Holiday season with each other. This year, in contrast, we really dove into the holiday spirit: we got a Christmas tree, hung lights, hosted a Solstice party, attended several holiday parties, made cookies, wore ugly sweaters and enjoyed Oaxaca’s extensive holiday festivities, such as the Night of the Radishes and so many Christmas decorations and lights!

Finally, last night (sunset of January 1st), in what seemed like a dream in itself, we joined our dear friend Samuel, who married us in 2022, in his community of Teotitlan del Valle for the most incredible and special gathering for the New Year we have ever been privy to witness.

Not only were we steeped in the Valley Zapotec (Beniza’a/Dixza) language everywhere—including the anouncements and presentations, but also throughout the massive crowd—but everyone builds tiny rocks houses (see Zack’s above), furnishes them with hopes & dreams for the new year and lights them with candles, amid amateur  and professional pyrotechnics, and a terrifying game where participants toss burning wood “balls” back and forth to one another… with their bare hands.

Because the event was spread over was two opposing the hills, the nighttime was magically lit with an incredible sea of hundreds and hundreds of families around their campfires, setting off fireworks and singing and laughing, apart and together, awaiting the moment the Pleiades constellation touches the sacred peak of their mountain, Picacho.

This is stuff dreams are made of… Oaxaca is endless.

Let the Adventures of 2024 Commence!

As it is tradition now to say: “We are planning our most ambitious adventure schedule yet”, and we could not be more excited to announce partnerships with incredible visiting mycologists and authors, such as Alissa Allen, returning for her third time to dye with us in the mountains of Oaxaca, and Christian Schwarz, a long-time associate, co-author of “Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast” and mycologist extraordinaire!

Our local partnerships with mycologists Iñaki Ibarrola and Ezequiel Cruz, mushroom chef master Ariadna Pinacho, guide and naturalist Celestino Mendez, the Mancomunados of the Sierra Norte, our new silk-producing friends in San Pedro Cajonos continue to blow our minds with their graciousness, ingenuity and love the natural world, not to mention their knowledge, artistry, and wisdom.

We have enjoyed such wonderful connections with fellow nature geeks, and each year with our adventures it just gets deeper and more immersive! We hope you will join us for the most in depth adventures one can cram into a short 7-day period. We are confident that your time with us will be life-changing in the most impactful way!

Join us in 2024!

Things have been accelerating here in Oaxaca for our tour season, as well as making new partnerships and friends! So read on for a journey with the People of the Clouds into the ludic realm of spores and forest games of discovery.

On Tourism..

We at The Fungivore started with our first mushroom tour in Oaxaca in 2019— and as we are in the midst in 2023, I am happy to say that 5 years in, the form of this project that best suits our attitudes, our dreams and our particular skill-sets is really coming into a sharper focus, and our mission and dreams are in hi-def, compared to when we began. It seemed we were starting a business for tourism; but…

...tourism is a loaded word. There are so many flavors of “tourism,” but so much of the industry does little to preserve our world and our heritage, natural and historical. And therein lies the tourism rub: how do you attract people to show off the wonder of the your world (and profit from it) without aiding it’s destruction?

Most don’t try. They simply create a demand for a location, and extract as much as they can, from both the vacationers, but also from the environment, in some cases eventually causing so much destruction that the place itself is effectively destroyed.

What if there was an alternative? What if at the end of a visit the attendees, the communities & the tour leaders all felt inspired, replenished and excited for the next opportunity? What if instead of the familiar dynamic of the “served” and “servers,” experiences were designed specifically for everyone involved to leave feeling full?

We think we may be on to something…

We have just completed our 6th mushroom tour, and the first of five this season. Over the last year, we have deepened our comprehension of Spanish to the point of full—if not halting and broken—conversations without English; we have spent quality time with new friends in the Mexico mushroom sphere; we have created a brand for ourselves, even among our neighbors, as ‘the mushroom couple.”

And it has made all the difference.

Since our first introduction to the mancomunádos—a group of 8+ communities of the Sierra Norte near the edge closer to the valleys of Oaxaca—in 2019, we have found that language barriers just melt away when two or more people let their inner nature geek shine. Wonder and curiosity will get you everywhere.

As a result of our continued push to grow our mycelial network (and to meet new friends and spawn new partnerships in the process), we have greater enhanced our tour adventures, as well as our own experiences as Americans living so close to home, yet so far away.  There is obviously so much more than can be shared in a single email, but I want to highlight our just finished tour, “MyComida: Ruprestre Tour.” I can say with certainty that this tour week was the highlight of my entire career in fungi to date…

Our group had been hiking 8 km a day (or more!) for 4 days, had visited multiple ruins, eaten at fantastic restaurants, tasted mezcal, participated in the Cuajimoloyas mushroom festival, crossed terrifying suspension bridges, and found & eaten countless mushrooms—ALL at 10,000ft (3000m) elevation —before we settled into the tiny pueblo of El Carrizal.

El Carrizal is made up of about 250 people, situated on a ledge and surrounded by canyon-like walls, a wonderland of waterfalls and woods. It was already hard to imagine how the trip could get much more amazing, and though Kim & I had arranged the experiences, this year, the second time around, something happened that accelerated the magic already present in Southern Mexico, and this small canyon valley in particular.

We spent the next 2.5 days exploring three different forests, caves, waterways and canyons, found a rare (and deadly!!) baby pit viper that our biologist was so excited by, and racked up nearly 150 species of fungi, which we arranged for public display for the community to join, and observe the process of finding and identifying.

On the final day, something miraculous happened: despite the village losing all electrical power for the previous 36 hours, 'El Equipo Fungivoros' (Team Fungivore) put on a mini-mushroom festival, designed and curated for the community in particular—all in Spanish—using only the mushrooms and lichens found in their forest.

With the help of our orchid-loving, mountain-biking nature guide, friend and partner Celestino Mendez, Biologist (Herpetologist) Eli García-Padilla (who also gets most of the photo credit for this email) shared the sciences dangerous and not-so-dangerous reptiles to help dispel myths (and save reptile lives); team mycologist Iñaki Oyervide-Ibarrola led an intensive on cultivating, both capturing spores for germination, as well as inoculating bags of boiled straw—something this community had asked of us in 2022; my wife Kimberly Hunter demonstrated the process using mushrooms for dyes, but also taught the methods for testing unknown fungi for their color potential.. so much of Mexican mycology is still unexplored!

With Iñaki’s guidance, we all participated in a Mushroom Table Talk, in Spanish [and English when necessary], about how to recognize various mushrooms families, how to be sure of what is toxic, what is edible, what could be medicinal (and how to extract compounds), and what can be used as a dye mushrooms; answering questions as they came up… many of which become full conversational explainers!

Finally (since the comal was already hot), I cooked up a few of the mushrooms using fresh wild pericón (“Mexican tarragon”) as the herbal highlight... something which—despite its abundance—surprised the locals with just how well it accented the also common Amanita basii, with which they are so familiar. (The locals use pericón as tea for stomach problems, and also as a deep yellow dye, but not, apparently, for cooking.)

To our joy and surprise, a large portion of the community that came mid-afternoon stayed with us for 6 hours, straight into the dark, taking notes and recording videos of the process. The looks of joy and wonder and conversations loaded with excitement were more than contagious. I believe it was in that moment that our project crystalized: this isn’t tourism. We are playing our part in the grand goal to connect people and places globally, to amplify the differences and celebrate the similarities, and most importantly, move forward together.

How can one not become high and filled with hope after so much conversation, dialogue, exchange of ideas, active listening, humble learning, patient teaching, group laughter, & shared smiles with no words?

In Oaxaca, the month of July is the month of Guelaguetza, a Beniza’a (Zapotec) word meaning ‘to give & to get,’ a crucial axiom of their 3000+ year old culture, and a reminder that open honest exchange is the way of joining people together, locally and globally.

This exchange is the future (and the past) of community.

We hope you’ll come and build with us.

Here is a description of the artwork:
          "Toth Indian Giant "Ikala  Nawan" ("Man Who Fishes") was sculptor Peter Toth's 57th "Whispering  Giant." It was carved in 1987 out of cedar log and placed on a concrete  base. The sculpture was carved to honor the Chinook, Clatsop, and all  Northwestern Coastal Indians. It is difficult to get to this statue as  it now resides by an RV dump site. [Stavros K, 09/07/2016] As you enter  Astoria from the south you will see a large Indian Head carved by Peter Toth. This artist has scattered these sculptures all over the USA in tribute to Native Americans. This statue is kind of hard to stop and see  due to the traffic patterns, so keep your eyes open as you drive past. [Phrank Phester, 10/05/2015] The head may be Peter "Wolf" Toth's tribute to Chief Comcomly, who is buried elsewhere in Astoria."

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     The fascination with the mostly unseen world of fungi is more than meets the eye.  We enjoy them for eating, for dying clothing, for understanding more deeply about the Universe though careful use of psychedelic properties, and we enjoy much more of their actions than we know in the management of the Earth itself, the production of our favorite foods like wine, cheese and bread.

     Stepping backward, we know that Kingdom Fungi has been around far longer than either plants or animals--both of which broke off from early fungi on the evolutionary tree--and there is research in just the past few years asserting a fungal consciousness, not intelligence, but literal consciousness.  Frankly, this is exactly how it feels when I let myself be in touch in the woods: that they are aware of your presence and they are reacting to you, even playing with you.  In my more exciting dream-fantasies, actually have control of time and space to some degree to make mushrooms appear under your feet when a minute ago there were none!

     This connection to consciousness as a Universal Quality is explored in the newest Star Trek series Star Trek: Discovery, where Astro-mycologist Lieutenant PAUL STAMETS (seriously) utilizes the underlying Universal Mycelial Web to transport the newest Star Fleet vessel, the USS Discovery anywhere in spacetime in an instant.  The idea of this pervading force is clearly now a mainstream concept.

     So is it surprising to find composer Václav Hálek from Poland who can hear individual songs from each of the mushrooms he encounters?  The hidden world of fungi is not under the ground any more than our consciousness resides in the connections of our neurons. Just as we can use our made-up language to communicate complicated and lofty concepts such as what I am sharing now, should not the neural networks of fungi have personalities and be able to transmit information into the world at large, using the language of their choosing, direct connection with our subtle (quite mycelial brains) consciousness as well?

     I am giving myself permission to dream, to use my liminal state of wakefulness, to reach out across barriers of communication and look for a new interpretation of what it means to be in the world that we share with our fungal ancestors.

     I recommend you do the same.

In a recent conversation as I began advocating for a Third Culinary Kingdom to be added to all culinary literature, it seemed a simple task to simply pull all of the information we have collected on cooking mushrooms, in all their varied forms from the vegetable section and simply create a new section. My initial desire to write this book began as a quest to expand the information on specific mushroom fruiting bodies, and collect the data to one digestible location and volume.  But would this new section only include recipes for the 30 or so mushrooms--wild and cultivated--that we utilize in cooking?

As I began to realize, the answer to this quandary is actually far more complicated and considerably more exciting. To illustrate this excitement, we need to take a step back in time, for this episode of Throwback Thursday.
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As has been detailed in previous posts, the difference between mushrooms and fungus is an extremely important distinction. When we talk about the Fungal Kingdom we are not simply talking about mushrooms, though they are the most visible and obvious avatar for the entire bunch, but referencing the Kingdom itself.  Just as the animal kingdom covers everything from shrimps to horses to humans, the Kingdom of Fungi covers all things fungus, from the undescribed under sea molds that help degrade fish, all the way to the beautiful variety of the the fruiting bodies with which we are so familiar.

I have to admit that I have been speaking incorrectly when giving my recent presentations.  One of the more interesting aspects of human and fungal evolution, is that it appears--in direct contrast to the apple or corn or other widely cultivated food stuffs that have evolved with us--that both lines existed in parallel to one another, and developed as they have without any type of evolutionary pressure in either direction. This is true only so long as one sees the fruiting bodies of mushrooms as the only representatives of our culinary interactions.

The point is well illustrated by the human relationship with the plant Maize--what we call corn.  Maize was a small granular form of grass that produced a tiny (2-3cm maximum) single seed pod per plant--called teosinte--a mere 11,000 years ago. Through selective cultivation this tiny source of scant food was transformed into the five different distinct genetic varieties of Maize still in use today, and within these five varieties, the hundreds of phenotypic varieties as well. The result is the multi-colored and variety of shapes that are as numerous as there are valleys in Oaxaca.  This one plant has allowed for the expansion of human settlements throughout Mexico and all of the Americas, and is a staple part of the human diet all over the globe. There is no question that maize/corn was and remains one of the most important symbiotic relationships humans have formed in our recent past.

As the most telling contrast with edible mushrooms, the morel (Morchella spp.)--as detailed in an earlier post--evolved in their current form 129 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous Period, at a time when dinosaurs would still rule the earth for another 65 million years. Yes we eat morels, but we do not rely on them. And we help disperse their spores; but they do not rely on us.

And so I have stated in my talks on the science of cooking mushrooms that we operated in parallel. But I am sorry to say that I have been wrong, and I apologize for allowing the bias against fungus that I am constantly fighting to creep into my own observations. 

Fungi and recent Human Evolution
It would be a very different world indeed if we had not isolated penicillin from a moldy cantaloupe mid-WWII. Perhaps the Allied Forces would not have won the war; perhaps the diseases that tend to aggregate in hospitals would have wiped out a significant portion of the population much earlier.  Penicillin, the collective name for antibiotic medicines derived from various strains of molds--the Penicilliums, all fungi but none a mushroom--indisputably affected human evolution, though being inside the affected/surviving group, it may be hard to say with certainty what the result would have been had we not made our alliance when we did.

Curiously, strains of Penicillium mold were already being used in cheese making and cured meats long before its ubiquitous use in modern medicine. “Mould ripened cheeses include semi-hard cheese—e.g. Stilton, Roquefort—in which the ripening agent, Penicillium roqueforti, grows in the interior of the cheese, and also soft cheese of comparatively small size or shallow depth—e.g. Camembert or Brie—in which the mould-ripening agent P. camemberti or more usually P. caseicolum (P. candidum) grows on the surface of the cheese” [THE MICROBIOLOGICAL EXAMINATION OF CHEESE, W.F. Harrigan, Margaret E. McCance, in Laboratory Methods in Microbiology, 1966]. Though data would prove hard if not impossible to gather, the preponderance of evidence would suggest that by extending the shelf life of dairy and meat products, we humans were able to expand our empires more effectively. Research shows that the molds we use for cheese production produce fungal toxins in the lab, and some tests have shown extensive liver damage to lab rats when exposed to the toxins produced by Penicillium roquefortii, the primary mold used in blue cheese making.  But despite the toxins in isolated cultures of these molds, they have never been found in food products. Some toxins are apparently broken down by their interaction with the dairy products.  So not only are we extending the shelf life and perhaps nutritional content of our food, we are also making the molds that are otherwise toxic and intrinsic components of our diet. [MYCOTOXINS | Classifications L.B. Bullerman, in Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition (Second Edition), 2003].

Stepping back even further in the human evolutionary line, there is much data to support the idea that fermentation, or at least the processes used to make fermented products, including boiling the water used, saves lives. In large settlements--especially since developing agriculture in the most recent 15,000 years--water is often tainted and a carrier of various diseases. The safest source of hydration was instead early beer and wine, due to the active boiling of the wort and the introduced living cultures actively working in our favor, increasing the nutritional availability of the fermented grains and other components. Mead, perhaps some of the oldest recorded intentional fermented beverages made from honey, contains all of the health benefits of the ferment as well as the healing nature of honey itself.

Of course, the yeasts used for alcohol production are similar to the yeasts used in the rising and fermentation of bread, both commercially available and also the sourdough cultures in kitchens around the globe.  Yeasts are perhaps the smallest characters in the fungal kingdom: diminutive eukaryotic single-celled organisms that feed on sugars, and are populating the air, the surfaces of almost everything living, and ubiquitously distributed everywhere around the globe. Early fermentation wasn’t an exception, it was the rule. Not only has fermentation been naturally occurring since long before humans arrived on Earth, but fermented products have a long history of use in the animal kingdom, as well. There are flocks of birds that will populate fruit trees and wait for the fruit to ferment, and imbibe in alcohol fueled revelry. The same is true of apes, elephants and other creatures in our shared kingdom.  While we don’t have the language to know if animals were aware of the health benefits of fermented products, they were certainly benefitting from these aspects, and we know that all of evolution is a meandering path from successful accident to successful accident. 
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Erecting a Third Culinary Kingdom
Since before we recorded cooking methods, multitudes of unnamed mothers have provided wisdom and nutrition from the kitchen when recipes were understood by action and passed down by oral tradition, our species partnered with fungi in everything from bread to cheese to wine, to the wide variety of pickles, koji ferments (shoyu, miso, tempeh, etc.), to cured meats.  Not only did the preservation of fermented products extend portability of products, but the changing flavors and unintended new chemical suites created by these natural processes inspired new methods of cooking and new cuisines while keeping us healthy, delivering safe products that also had healing and immune-balancing properties that we see in many species of edible fungus throughout the fungal kingdom.

One of the main battles of my project is fighting through the intrinsic biases in mycophagy.  Cookbooks and authors betray their readers in unseen biases all the time, presumptively placing mushrooms in the vegetable section without a thought. And in writing this piece, I am taking responsibility for my own betrayal, my own biases. I am both ashamed and overjoyed to see my blindspot exposed: to say that fungus and humans evolved in parallel is only true if mushrooms are the only part of the fungal kingdom we examine.

And so, if we are to truly honor the role that fungus has played in our culinary development by gifting this most ancient kingdom its rightful place in our cookbooks, it would be far from just an expose on how to prepare and utilize mushrooms in the kitchen. We would find ourselves perhaps rearranging our entire body of cooking literature to place all of the above mentioned items squarely in the Fungal Kingdom section of cookbooks:

• Yeast breads and sourdoughs
• Beers, meads, sake, wine and other alcoholic beverages
• Inoculated cheeses
• Lacto-fermented pickles
• Various ferments & cultured foods
  
• Koji products: from miso to garum to shoyu to tempeh
  
• Cured meat products such as salami, etc, which has penicillin or koji on the outside of their skins, helping to protect and dehydrate the hanging meats.
• AND of course the multitude of wild and cultivated mushrooms of which I am so fond.
  

By acknowledging the hugely ignored role of fungus in our culinary heritage, we are actively working through our own bias that mushrooms are the entirety of the fungal kingdom, or that we can choose whether or not we interact with fungus as we exist and eat.  Of course avoiding any contact with fungi is achievable, but as Paul Stamets has said time and time again: when the going gets rough, the organisms that partnered with fungi survive the worst again and again.

As it turns out, Erecting a Third Culinary Kingdom is not so much a mission to collect the disparate science on cooking mushrooms from around the scientific borderlands, but a recognition that we have integrated many of our processes with fungi already, and that by acknowledging the role they have played and giving them their rightful place in our culinary lineage, we will find that the Fungi Section of the cookbook already exists, but is dispersed throughout the pages in print.