Is the Fungus Among Us Helping Us All?
Mushrooms are literally everywhere, but they're doing much more than simply feeding us. How can we play a better role to them as collaborators?
Welcome back to The Link, a bi-weekly newsletter making the connection between “regenerative farming,” and you—city slickers, country mice, and everyone living in the in between—every other Sunday.
There I was at the crack of dawn, sitting inside a messy, unmarked white van, existentially contemplating the direction of my tiny 25 year old life. It’s a charming cliche to pull the “Are you there God, it’s me, Margaret” in your 20s, but particularly sobering when you’re waiting on a shipment that’s dropped off inside a warehouse hanger full of live puppies, dead bodies, crates packed with bananas, shoes, and oysters. I wasn’t in purgatory. I was just outside the cargo hanger at JFK airport, the place where everything that’s not luggage in the bottom of the airplane gets sorted.
An esoteric part of my career history is that I used to be a truffle dealer, which required sitting at JFK a few times a week to pick up boxes and boxes of wild mushrooms that had been flown in from the Pacific Northwest, black and white truffles foraged and sourced across Eastern Europe, Spain, and Italy, fancy caviar, and the occasional wild edibles (ficoïde glaciale, sumac, whatever) from Canada. I’d take all of the fungi back to the company’s warehouse in Brooklyn, weigh and sort the intake, then ride/stink up the subways of New York City with a refrigerated backpack full of at least $60,000 worth of truffles and a tote bag full of caviar. The final destination was to whichever Michelin-starred restaurants needed them, where these ingredients were highest in demand. Sometimes I’d take the truck and do deals outside the restaurants, selling crates of matsutake or hen of the woods or whichever fungi had been picked on the other side of the country the day before. Sorting through these expensive foods felt so disconnected from the forests and the great journey that each had made before they landed on an expensive dinner plate. I thought nothing of my part in this incredibly environmentally taxing business, except for the public humiliation, being called “Fungus Girl” by chefs, or getting yelled at on the subway. One person once accused me of defecating on the F train because the scent of truffles was so pronounced. (Scent has its right place, and it’s not always where you expect it).
But in the 2010’s, as I started working at VICE, there were two guys literally down the block—who were already thinking about reversing the damage that mushroom freaks like me had done. Adam DeMartino and Andrew Carter co-founded Smallhold, a mushroom company that has transformed our notions of distributed agriculture to bring fresh, affordable, hyperlocal produce to mouths around the country. From grow kits to building innovative refrigerators (a.k.a. mini farms) that grow your favorite mushrooms directly in the grocery store, the company is reimagining how space and technology can collaborate with fungi to provide food sources and the circularity involved in a climate forward approach.
So if you’ve nibbled or glanced over any of these newsletters thus far, we’ve talked about the importance of soil health and the microbes and their impact on your health with the brilliant James Skeet of Spirit Farm. We’ve talked about why linear time is toxic, and we did a really quick cheat sheet on circularity with a touch of reality tv romance. Today, we’ll crack some knuckles and dig into bending your notions of mushrooms—not only from a “hey man, these can change your mind or whatever” to considering their role in the regenerative agriculture space, their place in the zeitgeist, and why incorporating them into your life (by eating them, composting them, or upcycling spent mushroom blocks into your soil, for example) is actually the opposite of 25 year old me’s bad baby carbon footprint moves.
I recently sat down with Andrew Carter to get his perspective on all of the above, and learn more about the radical ways that Smallhold is reimagining the impact companies and individuals have on our environment.
I’d like to start things off by asking what the term “regenerative farming” means to you?
It’s important that people are paying attention to it, but I think it is becoming a term that is getting used in all sorts of different ways, which I’m personally afraid of. I think that regenerative farming techniques should be giving back to the land. Better is subjective, depending on what we think of as better, but I think it’s about trying to be smarter about your use of resources and how you treat your topsoil and your team and the creatures that you are tending to in a way to leave it in a better condition than when you arrived there. Smallhold is a venture backed company, and most of the investors that are interested are interested in regenerative ag, but most are interested in climate technology and the future of food and stuff like that. The regenerative thing just feels so ambiguous to a lot of people, and I get worried more on the investor side of things, because people feel really good investing in it when they really have no idea what they are investing in. I’ve been in meetings with other companies that are doing “regenerative farming” things and they spend 30 minutes explaining what they do and I’m like, “You guys have no idea what you’re talking about.” It’s not to say that there’s not something amazing there—I just have yet to see third party verification of any of this stuff, so it turns into the same term as “natural” or anything that’s not third party verified. It’s important and if people are doing it right, it should be better than any other programs. I think it’s case by case at this point.
The way that you’re framing it kinda reminds me of the origin story of the “organic” label.
Certified organic has its own issues, and I think that that’s rightfully so, but it’s not like there’s no rules. There are rules that you have to follow to get certified, and I think that if the regenerative farming movement wants to resonate with customers and investors, it needs more rigor. But I’m excited that people are talking about food in general. They could be not talking about it and that would be worse.
So how would you describe the evolution of Smallhold?
We always had the idea of doing what we’re doing: a distributed farming network. The idea is specialty mushrooms. They don’t ship well. You can fly them from place to place and the carbon footprint of getting something fresh and tasty to people’s doors is just not what we want to be a part of. If we want a scalable solution to get people off of meat and trying out new mushrooms, we need to be doing it differently. We wanted to build this network of farms and when we started, we didn’t have any money or space, so we started in the basement for a while. I was experimenting with how to grow royal trumpets. Then we got a shipping container in Williamsburg at the Domino Factory for a couple years before it became Domino park.
A lot of people started paying attention to it and were like “Wow, this is cool, I want to mushroom farm inside my restaurant or store.” Whole Foods approached us and was like “This is crazy, we can’t have this in Whole Foods right now, but one day, we’d love to.” So it took us a little bit of time. We developed technology patents on a control system (there’s a big data story around it) but the idea is that we use this technology to efficiently grow these mushrooms close to consumers. Now we have farms in New York, Texas, and Los Angeles. We have packaged mushrooms in over 400 stores, not including all of the e-comm stuff (Fresh Direct, Misfits Market, Good Eggs, Imperfect Foods) and we have mini farm installations in all Central Markets across Texas now. They look like fridges but they’re using our technology to grow our mushrooms right on site. They are pretty amazing pieces of technology because of its precise climate control. You could probably age a salami in there. Capturing hundreds of thousands of data points every day, communicating with our server, it’s really hands off for the people operating it. The mushrooms are then directly harvested out of that fridge and placed directly on the shelf in the store.
The packaging component is one of many circular elements you’re employing in your practices. It seems like you’re constantly considering the life cycles of things as a business.
We think a lot about packaging. I think packaging is a huge issue in the food space. The mushroom section is generally filled with styrofoam or plastic wrap and that’s crazy because these products are some of the most sustainable you can buy, but are often packaged with unrecyclable materials. Most consumers think the packaging is recyclable and it’s absolutely not. We pack everything in compostable cardboard clamshells which do have a small plastic window (we didn’t originally have that) but retailers insisted (so we made it as small as possible) and we’re still trying to figure out other materials we can do that with. Weirdly, in the innovation space, we want to raise the bar so that other mushroom farms imitate us. It would be great if the big ones did. I just want to keep styrofoam and plastic out of the soil and ocean.
People could argue that Smallhold is actually a part of the regenerative farming space, because all of our mushrooms are grown from byproducts of the timber industry: sawdust that goes to plywood or the landfill, but all of it is diverted by growing our mushrooms on it. All of our waste goes straight to compost in different cities and projects. In New York, it goes to big farms on Long Island. In Texas, we have a few big composting projects. We’re working on a big farmer compost thing which is pretty cool. Central Texas Mycological Society takes a bunch of our blocks and distributes them and people regrow mushrooms in their own backyard, use them for mulching projects, and in LA, we’re working on a big composting project and a remediation project with LA DWP and Daneille Stevenson, a PhD candidate who got this gigantic grant to take on one of the biggest remediation projects on the planet. They’re very modest scientists but we’re pretty sure this is a huge deal. Using our substrates along with other fungi and different kinds of plants to go and deal with heavily polluted sites. There’s ten of them in total. One of them is an actual superfund site and most of them are brownfield spots that are polluted with lead and oil spills. It depends on how you define regenerative farming. I’d say we’re part of a better system for agriculture. I wouldn’t say that we’re mending the soil directly, but all of our compost ends up bringing nutrients back to the soil. It just depends on the lens that you look at regenerative farming, whether we’re a part of that or not.
I’ve used many Smallhold mushroom blocks to remediate my gardening soil that I picked up from the Texas Mycological Society. Over the past few years, we’ve been seeing the mushroom zeitgeist take off in American pop culture. But why now when they’ve been around/been so culturally vital for so many centuries?
I think it’s a Western thing. The mushroom market is very mature in places like China, Japan, and Korea. There are entire regions in China that are growing mushrooms. Most of it was funded by the government but 80% of the global mushroom market is grown in China and most of it is consumed domestically. In the US, the estimate is around 2-3 pounds per person per year, but in China, it’s about 20-30 pounds per person per year. It's a crazy difference. Why it’s important is because we’re seeing a doubling or tripling of consumption when there’s so much room to grow. I think we’re seeing a realization of what else is out there and people are excited about things that are not button mushrooms.
A few other things happened, during Covid in particular. There was a massive mushroom interest. I think people were at home and trying to be healthy. People were realizing this has other benefits. People are now paying attention to things like lion’s mane. While the mushrooms we’re talking about aren’t psychoactive, I think the interest in psilocybin mushrooms tempers down the fear for a lot of people who are then willing to experiment with them. I also think the doc Fantastic Fungi had a huge impact. We put together a grow kit during Covid that turned into a really big fad. Grow kits have been around for a while, but we are definitely now one of the bigger grow kit sellers in the country. I’ve been growing food for my whole career. My background is in greenhouse production, definitely not regenerative farming. I’ve never seen a product like mushrooms, which seems to be an obsession for many who have almost turned it into a lifestyle. We saw the kale thing, where people wore “Kale” t-shirts for a minute, but mushrooms have mycological societies, people read books and watch movies about them now. People are obsessed.
So what sort of impact, if at all, does the average human have on the world around us by incorporating mushrooms into our lives—whether it’s buying and cooking them, using spent mushroom blocks for compost, wearing mushroom leather, etc.?
I guess it depends on how much you eat mushrooms. There’s a lot of people out there who don’t like them because they’ve had a bad button mushroom experience from childhood, eaten a raw mushroom (which you’re not supposed to do), they think they’re allergic to them, or just don’t like them based on one experience. When you’re buying mushrooms on the shelf, they’re grown from waste streams from other industries. Button mushrooms, for example, are grown from corn cobs, chicken scratch, etc. and a lot of mushroom waste is then composted. It’s part of a circular system. Some of them have worse carbon impact than others. If it’s been shipped in from overseas, that shipping can sometimes be detrimental.
I don’t think consumers think too much about this stuff but I think they should. By integrating mushrooms into your diet, it’s a fraction of the carbon footprint you would have from consuming meat. You have to make a decision on what you’re trying to problem solve. I don’t think mushrooms are going to solve all the world's problems, but it’s solving many. If you care about your carbon footprint, circular systems, animal welfare, your water footprint, or if you’re buying them from a local economy, there’s a lot of benefits there. If you’re growing your own mushrooms, you can benefit from it because it’s as fresh as possible, it has even less food waste, and an even higher nutritional composition.
Is there anything else that you’d like to share?
I think mushroom farms are necessary for a regenerative system. The whole world needs to think about agriculture as a large system rather than something run company by company, because companies working on their own have a hard time being circular. Sure, they can try to target a singular component of the system, but you really need to be collaborative. So if we’re thinking about a future where we can be optimistic about agriculture, mushrooms have to be a part of it.
I couldn’t agree more. Thanks for taking the time to chat.
To learn more about Smallhold, you can visit their website and order some shrooms. Pick up your own mushroom block via the Central Texas Mycological Society here and get to composting, y’all. And if you have future topics, smart humans, or concepts you’d like to see featured, respond to this newsletter or drop me a line and say hey: Helen@HelenHollyman.com.
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