The Pacific Northwest is beautiful at this time of year. Leaves are turning, the air is cool, the rain is coaxing beautiful mushrooms out of the ground… and there is a frenzy to pick them.
I’ve been interested in mycology since I was a kid (it is seriously fascinating — watch this documentary if you are skeptical) but there seems to be a new energy. Instagram is bursting with enthusiastic foragers. Finding dinner in the woods dovetails well with the pandemic-induced trend of getting outdoors. I’ve had several friends tell me they’re getting into it, and surreptitiously allude to their favorite spots.
It’s not only a cultural phenomenon. Cutting edge science is only just starting to find out what we don’t know about mushrooms, whether it’s the complex relationships between trees and underground fungal networks, or the health and wellbeing effects of medicinal mushrooms (including, but not limited to, the psychoactive ones).
I just finished reading Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, which manages to build a powerful and provocative reinterpretation of contemporary capitalism by telling the story of the matsutake (you’ll read more about that extraordinary little mushroom soon).
For this Note, I talked to Nicco Muratore — a good friend, brilliant chef at Mamnoon in Seattle, and knowledgeable forager. Nicco’s joy and passion for mushroom hunting is infectious, and he documents his experiences in a beautiful way (you can see his foraging adventures on Instagram here). What follows is our conversation about foraging, lightly edited. Photos are mine unless otherwise noted, from a mushroom walk I took this weekend (no picking until I learn more).
First off — where do you go to find mushrooms?
I spend a lot of time in the national forests in Washington. Most of them you’re allowed to pick mushrooms in, and they’re also beautiful places. So for me it's a twofold reason.
First, being able to escape the city and get into the woods — just to be in nature — means a lot to me. To get to enjoy these absolutely beautiful areas of the state that are untouched by any development, and see crazy mountain-scapes. Washington, Oregon, California have so much of that. It’s amazing that a lot of land is protected and won’t ever be developed.
The second part is the mushrooms. There’s something magical about the forests here in the Northwest. For me, growing up on the east coast, I had never seen these huge, towering conifer forests that go on for miles and miles. There’s something about the colors, the smell. I get out there and I feel peace, I feel calm. I don’t know if it’s the connection to these ancient trees or what. It’s hard to describe. I feel this immense sense of gratitude being out there. It’s such an amazing landscape, I can’t get enough of it. I keep coming back every week. It’s my church, if you will.
Especially this time of year I really focus on mushrooms – they’re kind of everywhere in the woods.
How did you learn to forage?
The first person to teach me about mushrooms was Tyler. His instagram is Mushrooms For My Friends, he’s great. He sells to restaurants, and when I was working at Commonwealth I bought mushrooms from him. He would come through, we’d look in the back of his car, and he’d have baskets of mushrooms — local mushrooms, mushrooms from the West Coast, from Canada, and I'd get to pick and choose.
We would get talking and I’d ask, Where do these come from? You get mushrooms in the summer? Locally? I was fascinated by it. I became obsessed with mushrooms.
So I started walking around in the woods, and I’d see mushrooms, and I’d pick them all. Which is a terrible idea. You should never pick all the mushrooms you see. There are a lot of poisonous ones out there.
But I’d pick them all, throw them in a basket and bring them to work with me. And the next time Tyler would came through, we’d look at them together. We’d do a little identification, and he’d help me. He’d say Look at this. What do you think this is? He was really good about pushing me to identify them myself by doing my research. That’s what sparked my interest. We became friends, started to hang out, and we’d go find mushrooms together. He was my mushroom mentor, if you will.
From there, it was an upward spiral of me doing my own research. I spend a lot of time on the computer looking at mushroom things. That’s actually the only thing I use Facebook for, is mushroom groups. Depending on where you are, it’s a great way to see who is out there, who is picking what and where, and who wants to meet up. People don’t give away spots, but they say Hey I’m in Western Mass, I’m at this elevation, and I picked chanterelles.
That was my entry point. I now participate in some groups out here in the Northwest, which is a much larger mushrooming community. It’s fascinating, and it’s fun to be a part of.
You’ve also alluded to some territoriality — people claiming “their spots” for foraging.
That’s the difference between commercial foragers and recreational pickers like myself. There are turf wars over matsutake mushroom spots in Oregon and Washington. The matsutake is the most prized mushroom that comes out of the northwest, and in the world. It goes for hundreds of dollars in Japan, and most of the mushrooms they import are from the Northwest!
There was a crazy boom in the 80s and 90s. Matsutake went up to $1000 per pound, it was a modern day gold rush. That mushroom gets a lot of attention from the commercial foragers. There have been instances of people pulling guns on each other in Oregon, in areas that are good mushroom spots. People saying This is my spot, get out of here. To me, that’s crazy, because it’s public land! It’s everyone’s land.
I don’t find territoriality as much with recreational pickers. If you’re on a trail in Washington or Oregon and you see some mushrooms, it’s not your spot. It’s a public spot where you happened to find mushrooms. It’s not mine, it’s not yours, it’s everybody’s.
In Washington, there’s an area I like to call the volcanic diamond, between Mt Reinier, Mt Hood, Mt St Helens and Mt Adams, which is mostly the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. In that diamond you have some of the most fertile soils in the state. It’s very good for the matsutake, which needs a sandy layer to grow in, and it thrives in the volcanic forests of that diamond.
We went down there last year to try and pick some, and there were caravans of commercial foragers driving into that area. Five or six guys in an SUV, with buckets and rain gear. The forest was picked out. There was no matsutake to be found.
We ran into a few commercial pickers deep in the woods. There was no beef or anything, but they were not friendly at all. We said Hi, how are you doing? They just looked at us, like, to scare us, and kept walking. If you run into recreational pickers, it’s a much more friendly culture.
You mentioned your mushroom mentor and your community — that seems to contrast with the sense of territoriality.
Ya. And that’s all about money. I’m not selling mushrooms, I’m out there for fun. I like when I see other people and meet them. I find the mushroom community to be fun and welcoming. It’s an odd thing we’re into, and it brings people together.
It’s the direct opposite of the commercial picker community. The industry is much more competitive, much more personal. My spot, not your spot. It’s about making money off of the forest.
At the same time, at the restaurant, I buy from companies that employ those commercial foragers! I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. The mushrooms don’t care if they get picked or not. It’s not like an animal. The mushroom is just a fruiting body of what’s happening underground.
There are many sides of the commercial industry. It’s bringing food to people. It’s a livelihood for some people who might not be able to make money otherwise. At the same time, there are stewardship aspects about how the forest is treated, which can be a problem with the commercial foraging industry. There are people who don’t really care if the forest is ok. They’re trying to make a buck.
For example, matsutake tend to grow under the duff. There used to be a method where people would use rakes to turn over that layer to find mushrooms more easily. And it’s terrible for the forest. Exposing all of that mycelium effectively kills it. It’s illegal now to do that in Washington and Oregon, where the matsutake production is high.
You used the word stewardship. That implies a sense of responsibility to both benefit from and care for the forest. It seems like there’s something about mushrooms that calls us to that aspiration. Is the dynamic relationship between mushrooms and trees a good metaphor for the dynamic relationship between foragers and forest?
Absolutely. There’s a relationship between trees and plants and this underground network that’s beautiful to me. I would hate to ever disturb something like that. When I’m going out in the forest, I’m doing it with intention. I’m trying to use it in a positive way, and not to pillage what’s there.
It’s a complicated history here in the Pacific Northwest, because of the history of logging, and the pillaging of the forest. It’s sad to me when I drive through a forest and think how beautiful it is, then come back three weeks later and see it all cut down. I also understand there’s a need for using the forest as a resource as well, but it is contrary to how some of us see stewardship: letting things be, letting old growth forests remain. Sometimes I’m driving out into the forest and I see full clear-cuts along the way. It’s an interesting dynamic, because the US Forest Service is involved on both sides.
You’re foraging recreationally for yourself – but you’re also a chef. You prepare food for a living. And you do amazing things with mushrooms! Would you ever put mushrooms you’ve picked on the menu?
When we’ve picked a lot, ya, I’ll bring it to the restaurant and we’ll serve it. Especially in the fall, when there is a huge abundance of chanterelles in pretty much all of the woods, I’ll bring them back and serve them at the restaurant. If I’m going for a walk and pick five pounds of mushrooms, I’m not going to eat all five pounds, so I’ll definitely put them on the menu.
It’s a fun way to talk to my staff team about it, and get them excited about local mushrooms. And everyone always thinks it’s cool that the chef foraged ingredients himself. You’re allowed to serve wild mushrooms at a restaurant, here in Washington.
From a regulatory perspective? How is that controlled, legally and in practice?
I have a piece of paper where I write down what I picked, the date, and essentially sign off saying I know what this mushroom is. There are a lot of laws around commercial mushroom picking and serving wild mushrooms. It’s nice. On the east coast they don’t do this at all. If a restaurant serves wild mushrooms, it’s technically illegal.
The state of Washington is very good about putting out mushroom information. The Forest Service, USFS, is organized into zones. Each ranger district has their own governing body for mushrooms in that area. In some zones, I don’t need a permit as a recreational picker — there’s just a limit of 5 gallons per day, for example. Totally reasonable! That’s a lot of mushrooms.
Each Ranger District has information online. In most cases, recreational permits are free. They call them Free Use Permits. You apply for it online, you print it, and carry it with you. You’re supposed to record when, where, and what you harvested.
There are some rules around picking. For example, if I am a recreational picker, I have to cut my matsutake mushrooms in half. Why? So I can’t sell them.
If you’re a commercial forager, you pay $200 for the season, and you can pick as much as you want. The season opens on a certain day for certain mushrooms. Matsutake usually opens on labor day — and people will flood the forest. Especially in Central Oregon, toward the high desert, there are huge mushroom encampments that get set up, and people will live there for weeks while the season is going on. But it’s policed. You can’t start your mushroom camp until the season begins.
The US Forest Service also puts out maps of where you can and cannot pick. It’s very well regulated.
I intuitively know I can’t just cut down trees in a national forest. But I think it will be surprising to many people that the government puts so much time and effort into organizing information and regulating mushroom foraging.
Right. There are whole sections of government websites dedicated to mushrooms!
Some of it is about money. The government knows that they can charge people to pick mushrooms, so they will. It’s a good chunk of change, but they also know how much money these pickers are making on the mushrooms. It’s a tradeoff. For the amount of work that foresters put into maintaining roads and trails, it’s a small price to pay.
Do you have any final thoughts?
I could talk about mushrooms for hours! But I’ll say this: one of the true hallmarks of natural beauty in the forest is all these incredible shapes and colors and sizes of mushroom. We know very little about their underground relationships. It really is fascinating. Especially the sharing of resources between trees, using the mycorrhizal networks underground to transfer resources. These trees produce immense amounts of oxygen and create amazing, rich, beautiful environments. It’s not just the woods — it’s something deeper. It’s the earth, it’s where we live, and we’d better take care of it.