Mushrooms are more than fungi.
During the second lockdown, Biplab Mahato passed the time with his mother while she tended to her vegetable garden in their backyard in Jamshedpur. She would draw his attention to the progress of her plants, and they’d pluck the ripe produce for their meals. After a particularly rainy spell, Biplab noticed tiny mushrooms poking their heads out of the thatched roof of the storeroom. His mother reminded him that these were “paddy straws (Volvariella volvacea),” and that as a child, he’d “eaten them, but because of their unavailability in the cities — I’d moved for education and work — I’d completely forgotten about them,” he tells us. Spurred by this food memory and “research that mushrooms are the fastest way to build one’s immune system in a natural way,” within two weeks, Biplab had decided to grow these mushrooms in his mother’s backyard.
Mushroom in my heart
After a decade spent working in music, counterculture events, and social media, Biplab was unemployed; he found himself composting, watching YouTube videos to understand how to extract spores, and starting a growing shed. Serendipitously for him, his time cultivating paddy straw mushrooms coincided with two lucky breaks: “the Hindu month of Shravan, when people don’t eat meat” and “the rainy, humid, yet hot conditions caused by a cyclone raging off the coast of Orissa.” The apocalyptic weather conditions turned out to be “perfect for these mushrooms to thrive,” and the abstinence calendar meant that, over and above his giving away the excess crop of mushrooms, “my neighbours were happy to pay for it too.”
From the simple angle of personal consumption, Biplab saw the “commercial potential” of this venture. He reconfigured his professional experiences “in advertising, marketing, and brand building” and trained at the Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (ICAR) in Bengaluru before starting Shroomin’. His “small, urban mushroom farm” grows and supplies fresh local and gourmet varieties of mushrooms used in cooking and “dried functional varieties” that are consumed as teas.
Button up — it’s actually a wild ride!
“If one’s ancestors ate a particular mushroom and then passed it down through the food system within a community, [that’s] the true test [of whether] a variety of mushroom is edible and not poisonous,” Biplab says, cautioning us against recklessly picking mushrooms in the wild. He’s fervently against the cultivation and consumption of the widely available white button mushrooms “because they’re industrial grade, grown for their large yield and not for their nutrition.” He also tells us that the natural variety of these mushrooms are “brown and found [growing in the] wild across the United Kingdom alone,” but industrial–agricultural techniques have been used “to standardise the colour into white” and cultivate them across the world. This is because white is considered “pure and edible,” unlike the rich spectrum of colours seen in wild mushrooms. Another reason for their prevalence “is their long shelf life.”
Biplab vehemently urges us to “avoid them” and then proceeds to take us through a sensory, scintillating experience of mushrooms — both cultivated and wild.
The details: Head here for a list of Shroomin’ products as well as to avail their expertise through workshops and camps for children.
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