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Comment by malermeister | Hacker News Reader

That's not necessarily true. Industrial scale foraging of mushrooms isn't great for forests, so relieving some of that pressure is a good, pro-habitat thing imo.

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Is industrial scale foraging really a thing? That is scary. I figured that there must be some cottage level foraging going on, but that most mushrooms available for sale were simply species that are easier to cultivate.

Yup. A lot of the "nicer" (chantarelles, porcini, truffles, morels (until now! :)) ones can't be cultivated.

Here's [1] an old NYT article saying there's ~8k commercial mushroom foragers in the US in 1993. I'm sure it's more now.

I know that in Europe there's a lot of commercial scale mushroom foraging going on in Eastern Europe.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/28/us/rushing-to-gather-up-c...

My favorite so far is chicken of the woods. I might try cultivating it next year.

I’d love to know how you prepare it… in my area we’ve found a few, but it’s been a dark art of waiting for the snow to be off the ground to get into the areas where we know them to be, and them being dried out and dead by the time we get there…

That's interesting. I guess you're in a cold area for snow 5o still be around, since they typically fruit June-Sept here.

I like to cut them into pieces and either sauté them or pan fry them like with light breading, like my homemade chicken nuggets.

I may have been given incorrect information, but I've heard that chicken of the woods is incredibly difficult to cultivate, close to morels (you need just the right conditions).

You might like this book, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mushroom_at_the_End_of_the...:

The book describes and analyzes the globalized commodity chains of matsutake mushrooms.

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