Tucker Pforzheimer and Truman French are mushroom farmers with tents full of logs and a passion for shiitakes. They are the brains, heart, sweat and soul behind MV Mycological.
Mushrooms are the richest and meatiest food I know of outside the animal kingdom. In the past few weeks, following a number of torrential rainstorms, mushrooms have begun popping up everywhere on the Island. On a visit to a friend’s house off of Middle Road two weeks ago, friends and I stumbled upon a yard filled with chanterelle mushrooms and the black trumpet variety. We harvested the chanterelles first that day from underneath a maple tree, leaving the black trumpets to grow larger.
Island seaweed artist, centenarian, naturalist and amateur mycologist Rose Treat periodically sends letters to the editor of our hometown newspapers. And she does us a great public service by doing so. Every year or two, she writes a note to remind us to take care around wild mushrooms, and to watch our children, pets and self around these fortuitous fungi, lest we inadvertently ingest the wrong ones and injure ourselves.
There’s an old Yankee saying: There are old mushroom pickers and there are bold mushroom pickers, but there are no old, bold mushroom pickers.
If you’re of a philosophical mind-set, you might wonder why Mother Nature produced thousands of mushrooms of varying shapes, colors and sizes, and created a few of them so delicious that we’re willing to risk our lives by mistakenly eating any one of the poisonous variety. Why can’t they all go right into the frying pan?
