Inside the Quirky World of Mushroom Foraging
The community room at the Huntsville Public Library is almost packed on a Tuesday night for a talk by Mark “Merriwether” Vorderbruggen. After months of drought, rain is finally in the forecast. That means mushrooms. These fungi fruit from their larger, hidden structures underground—called mycelium—when the air is moist. As Vorderbruggen talks, the audience takes extensive notes and pictures of his slides. The questions they ask show deep knowledge of the subject, especially how to avoid poisonous look-alikes.
The Houston area is full of mushrooms. There are giant puffballs, which taste great sautéed in butter. Hen of the woods, popular in Japanese and Chinese dishes. Black morels, which have medicinal properties related to cardiovascular health. Quirky foragers spend their time in the forest hunting for these tasty fungi.
Vorderbruggen gives these talks regularly, building a dedicated fanbase of nature lovers, gourmands, and would-be poultice makers. A tall, genial man who moved here after growing up in rural Minnesota, he resembles an exceptionally mellow viking more interested in hiking than pillaging.
Foraging is a practice known for overlapping with grifters hawking naturalistic fallacies. Vorderbruggen, who has a PhD in physical organic chemistry from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, only recommends mushrooms for medicinal purposes using current, peer-reviewed literature that suggests uses as cancer preventive or diabetic aids. Although that’s not always what all the attendees of his talks seek.
“I’d say about 80 percent of the people who come for the medicinal knowledge are actually looking for psilocybin,” he says, referring to the psychedelic compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms. “The ones who want real medicinal knowledge are often the most cautious and educated. They know poison is powerful and are often less eager to actually eat the stuff.”
Vorderbruggen says the most common types of people he gets in his classes are adventurous and enthusiastic foodies, hippies with a penchant for sustainable living, and disaster preppers.
“I get a lot of people who want to go out in the woods, fish, then find something tasty to go with the fish,” he says. “That, or they want to make something unusual to impress their friends.”
Marli Stahl, a diminutive but tough woman, was at his latest talk, along with her four young children. They live just outside Willis, north of Conroe on the edge of the Sam Houston National Forest. She started foraging last year and has since built a small mushroom harvesting operation in her backyard, mainly lion’s mane mushrooms that she sells at a local farmers market. The mushrooms are white with a distinctive top that looks like a bleached willow tree.
“A friend told me that they tasted just like lobster,” she says. “I didn’t believe her until I cooked one. You could put that sucker on a buttered roll.”
Stahl homeschools her children, and with conservation at the core of her philosophy, she has worked mushrooms into the curriculum. Her 7-year-old can say “mycelium” and use it correctly in a sentence. The family learns about how mushrooms are being used to leach toxic metals and petroleum from dump sites, a practice being pioneered in the Los Angeles area by the University of California, Riverside.
“My parents researched sustainability a lot growing up, and it made me want to work more synergistically with the land instead of depleting it, Stahl says. “Not everything needs to be stripped and mono-cropped.”
Jessica Haake is another mother, homeschooler, forager, and backyard mushroom grower. Like Stahl, she uses mushroom bricks: retail kits of wood matter that are inoculated with mycelium prior to purchase. A certified Texas Master Naturalist, she also forages, usually in the woods outside Splendora where she moved from Katy.
“I love getting to forage and identify,” she says. “It’s definitely empowering to know I have food, and that’s free and that I can pick up right from the ground.”
Haake enjoys a good lion’s mane mushroom, as well as oyster mushrooms, which grow on trees and have an almost vanilla taste that makes them a welcome addition to hot and sweet soups. Despite her credentials and enthusiasm, because of the risk of poisoning, she is careful to never go hunting without a guide, including one of Vorderbruggen’s books, Foraging: Explore Nature’s Bounty and Turn Your Foraged Finds into Flavorful Feasts.
Mushrooms can be found in virtually every wooded area in Southeast Texas thanks to the wet climate. Your nearest national forest or state park will have a dozen varieties visible a day or so after rain. They can even be seen from the trails of the Houston Arboretum, though visitors are discouraged from foraging there.
The danger that toxic mushrooms pose is why Teri MacArthur recommends against amateur mushroom foraging. Nicknamed the Mushroom Queen of Houston, she also gives regular talks on the biology and uses of mushrooms in Southeast Texas. As president of the Woodlands G.R.E.E.N. activist organization, a group that promotes sustainability in North Houston, she takes people on mushroom walks to places like WG Jones State Forest all the time, but not as foragers.
“You can count on one hand the number of wild mushrooms I would eat,” she says. “Every year there are mushroom poisonings, frequently ending in death, and it’s so often people who have a family or cultural history of collecting mushrooms, and it only takes one bad pick of a look-alike. It’s not to be taken lightly.”
MacArthur has a deep respect for Vorderbruggen and says anyone foraging with him is likely safe but notes how dangerous it can be for someone with no education to go out with only a guidebook in hand. She prefers to have people simply identify mushrooms and learn their place in the natural ecosystem.
“If you’re lucky enough to be out with Mark, more power to you,” she says. “He is terrific on so many aspects of foraging, but it’s important to understand the dangerous aspects. Even people out there saying this is a safe mushroom, if it’s growing near a roadway or park, and you have no idea what pesticides have been used nearby. That’s not something you want to ingest either.”
Regardless, being in nature can have other psychological benefits. One day in early November, Vorderbruggen was deep in the woods of Georgia getting ready to teach a new class of foragers at an annual bushcraft fall gathering. He’d heard about the results of the presidential election, but no other details, and seemed eager to disappear back into the woods away from the stress. Being able to live off the land, including mushrooms, made him feel safer.
“The more you know about the natural resources around you, the more ungovernable you become,” he says. “It doesn’t matter who is in charge.”
