Introduction

Wild mushrooms have been praised by Roman and Chinese emperors alike while providing an important everyday food source for rural people around the world. But in America and other English-speaking countries, a deep and exaggerated distrust of mushrooms has denied them a cherished place at the dinner table. As Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out (Gould, 1997), this prejudice is expressed even in our everyday language: urban crime and taxes are said to ‘mushroom’ while prosperity and the arts ‘flower’!

Until recently very few Americans dared to eat wild mushrooms, and even fewer picked them. But in the 1980s, rising demand in the wealthier mushroom-loving countries caused them to look abroad for new sources of wild mushrooms. At the same time, Americans’ palates grew bolder and more sophisticated. Entrepreneurs rushed in to fill the rapidly growing demand for gourmet foods, and out-of-work rural Americans and recent immigrants (particularly from southeast Asia) saw picking wild mushrooms as a chance to make a decent living in a familiar environment, the forest, while maintaining a measure of personal dignity and cultural autonomy.

Thousands of people in the Pacific Northwest now pick and sell wild mushrooms. Most of them pick locally or opportunistically for a little extra cash or as one of several seasonally based strategies for survival.