Note: This week's newsletter is a guest post from Hannah Wallace, a writer and editor in Portland, Oregon, and a dear friend. She writes often about food, wine and sustainability, and has been editing The Windfall Dispatch all year. I invited her to fill in while I'm camping in Utah with my nieces this week. Here is her dispatch from a truffle festival she attended in early March.
Hello!
A few weeks ago, I attended the Oregon Truffle Festival, where I got to spend time with renowned mycologists Merlin Sheldrake and Christine Fischer, as well as self-taught mushroom cultivator and mycology influencer William Padilla-Brown. This year, the organizers changed the format. Instead of a fancy hotel, we gathered at Camp Westwind, a remote former YMCA camp on the Oregon Coast.
Camp Westwind sits on a peninsula facing Cascade Head, which is both a headland and a Biosphere Region that protects rare plants, grassland, and wildlife—including four endangered species. Not only were we surrounded by Sitka spruce and western hemlock dripping with moss and lichen, we were just feet from the Pacific and could see the waves crashing onto the beach as we ate breakfast in the main lodge. In other words, the setting was sublime.
Westwind has about a dozen rustic cabins scattered over the hillside. Because of their metal roofs, you learn what type of rain is falling by the sound: a gentle pitter-patter or a drumming downpour. Also: Camp Westwind has no Wi-Fi and no cell service. Ordinarily, that would feel like a deprivation of sorts, but the lack of connection with the outside world brought all of us fungi-lovers together. (Though a friend confessed that she walked down to the beach in the mornings so she could access cell service to keep her Wordle streak.) After dinner, we gathered spontaneously for musical evenings by the fireplace at McIver Lodge, where Merlin Sheldrake played ragtime tunes on the piano and others unselfconsciously danced—and sang—along.
Even though the ostensible focus of the gathering was Oregon truffles, we talked about lichen (a mind-blowing symbiosis of algae + fungi), Cordyceps, psilocybin, and even how to safely eat amanita muscaria (aka fly agaric—the hallucinogenic and also poisonous mushroom that Alice eats in Alice in Wonderland).
When we arrived on Friday afternoon, each from our own corners of the country or world, a young woman served us steaming mugs of a tasty bisque made with cultivated oyster mushrooms, wild winter chanterelles and other wild mushrooms—topped with black truffle-infused whipped cream and wild sheep sorrel. It was the perfect taste to kick off a weekend full of delicious locally foraged foods.
Later, I learned that this was Alanna Kieffer, a marine biologist who runs Oregon Seaweed in Garibaldi. Kieffer and Robin Jackson, a chef from British Columbia who is now also a mushroom cultivator, took us on a foraging walk to the beach. As we set out, Jackson, who now runs West Coast Mycology on Vancouver Island, showed us sheep sorrel, which grows right on the sand. Rare matsutake mushrooms, Jackson pointed out, tend to grow under the Evergreen Huckleberry shrubs (from the Vaccinium/blueberry family) that often populate the sandy parts of the Oregon Coast. On a rocky promontory, he showed us stonecrop, a sedum packed with vitamin C that may be best known to gardeners as a groundcover. “If all the colonizers who came here knew this was high in vitamin C, they might not have died of scurvy,” he said. I nibbled on a few leaves. To my palate, it tasted sprightly and lemony.
Then he showed us beach strawberries (not fruiting, of course) and the common plantain, growing out of the sand. “This is great to rub on a mosquito bite or other insect bites,” he said. Kieffer then told us about the wondrous seaweeds that we can eat, including a long green tube of kelp, which would later show up on our seafood plate at dinner. Seaweed is a magical food, she said, because it’s high in protein, grows super fast, and also sequesters carbon. At Oregon Seaweed, they grow dulse, a reddish brown seaweed, in huge tanks of fresh water. Dulse is not only 30% protein, it contains calcium, potassium, iron and omega-3s. Emerging research shows that feeding some types of seaweed to cattle could reduce methane emissions by up to 90%!
That night at dinner, I sat next to Francesca Marzitelli, a renowned truffle hunter from Quebec who was the first person to unearth the Quebec truffle. With her were an illustrator, Enzo Lord Mariano, and a journalist, Émélie Rivard-Boudreau, who together are writing a graphic novel about Marzitelli. As we feasted on a garlicky kale Caesar with dulse dressing and pork with beurre blanc, sprinkled with white truffles, we talked about food and travel. Some people carry photos of their children with them, but Marzitelli shared several small photo albums containing nothing but truffles. Between courses, she proudly showed me pictures of the impressive finds she has encountered during a career that continues into her late 70s.
Saturday morning after breakfast, I joined a nature walk with Sheldrake and mycologist Charles Lefevre, co-founder of the Oregon Truffle Festival. My friend Heather Arndt-Anderson, who produces OPB’s Superabundant newsletter, was also on the walk and helped point out myriad plants like salmonberry and coltsfoot.
As we paused at a spruce tree, Sheldrake spoke about how many ways there are to be a mycorrhizal fungus. Right at the beginning of life on land, he said, algae would wash up onto the shore. Since they didn’t have any roots, they learned to partner with fungi, which could act like their root system, supplying them with crucial nutrients. “They struck up this deal which enabled plant life on land, right from the start,” he said. “So that means that these fungal relationships are more fundamental to plant life than leaves or roots, fruit, wood, lots of planty planty things!” (His enthusiasm is contagious, in case you were wondering.) After that, mycorrhizal associations evolved multiple times, eventually developing into ectomycorrhizal associations, like truffles on coniferous trees. Sadly, Lefevre’s two adorable Lagotto Romagnolos did not find any truffles on our walk—though the dogs did dig up plenty of dirt.
Our walk with Sheldrake and Lefevre was followed by Padilla-Brown’s talk about how he came to cultivate mushrooms of all types, including Cordyceps, a fungus with potent medicinal qualities that in nature grows on insects. He grows the fungus in a lab in Pennsylvania, on cakes of myceliated rice. “In the U.S., you are not supposed to be growing things on bugs,” Padilla-Brown said, to a round of laughter. Padilla-Brown, who is the founder of Mycofest, is a self-taught mycologist and mushroom evangelist. (He dropped out of high school, he said, because “school was interfering with my education.”) At the age of 17, while cultivating a meditation practice, he began experimenting with psychedelics. That was his entrée to mushrooms of all types—and he’s never looked back. (You can follow him on Instagram, where he has nearly 80,000 followers, at @Mycosymbiote).
But the most fun we had was in the evenings, after our memorably good dinners, when we’d gather in the lodge for raucous musical entertainment at the piano. The second night, we were all less self-conscious. More of us danced and some of us even sang along when Sheldrake played As Time Goes By and We Three, a ballad from the ‘40s made famous by the Ink Spots and Frank Sinatra. Others were perfectly content to sit by the fireplace, chatting away, as other attendees worked on what looked like an extremely challenging mushroom puzzle. It was like summer camp meets music camp with truffle-loving adults.
Yours,
Hannah
Thank you, Hannah!
This sounds incredible!
You should check out Telluride’s Mushroom Fest too!