Food Skills Spotlight: Fungal Focus
Our new Food Skills workshop series starts now, and we're talking mushrooms. Plus, a film screening, garden opportunities and news, Stop Food Waste Day, and more, all in the notes.
This spring we welcome not only the return of warm weather and fresh veggies, but the beginning of our new Food Skills workshop series. With classes from local makers, doers, and businesses, we hope to provide opportunities for our community to reconnect to how and what we eat. The first guest is Fungal Focus, a local mushroom cultivation and education effort headed up by Katie Lawson. Fungal Focus places their focus far beyond the supermarket cremini pints most people are used to, inviting anyone who is interested into the mushroom’s world of utility, diversity, and deliciousness.
Lawson came to mushroom farming from two different places: personal necessity for less labor-intensive work than the farming she was doing and because she realized mushrooms are an overlooked crop. After attending a Salt Lake Public Library talk in 2016 featuring legendary mycology writer and researcher Peter McCoy, she realized that working with fungi could be a way to continue to grow local food with lower impact to her body while also being part of efforts to make mushrooms better understood and more often used. Now, instead of crouching on the ground all day, she works at waist height while pasteurizing straw and building the kits she sells.
In addition to growing mushrooms to sell, Lawson hosts classes and workshops that teach people the basics of mycology. “I just want people to feel comfortable using the language that is unique to mycology, talking about fungi on a hike or at their farm or in their dinner and understanding what it is and how it got there and the ecological roles that they’re playing,” she says. Cultivation can be a way to establish stepping stones towards more than just growing mushrooms for food, but for practices like mycoremediation, which is when fungi is used to clean up environmental decontamination. Mushrooms can also be grown to create packaging, for plastic degradation or medicinal extraction. “There’s a need for more knowledge around fungi and how to grow ‘em,” Lawson says.
Whatever the use, mushrooms are a highly sustainable crop, grown using substrate, which typically consists of all sorts of industry byproduct—poultry manure, cottonseed hulls, almond husks, corn cobs, brewers’ grain, wheat straw, molasses, and saw dust are all things that can be used to grow mushrooms, and the substrate used will always vary by region. In larger mushroom operations, the used substrate can be repurposed for things like mine reclamation projects, landscaping, gardening, and potting soil.
The full “a-to-z” of fungi is very involved (foraging the mushrooms, cloning them, and transferring them to substrates that they can grow on) but Lawson cuts a lot of it out for those who buy her kits. She starts with a liquid substrate bought online, which then grows and expands in a modified mason jar, before being moved on to grains and the straw or sawdust—that’s the part that comes with the kit. Contained in buckets, the kits are intended to be grown outdoors for beginners, though those with experience can grow indoors if they know when to cut the mushrooms before they drop spores—which are not good to have floating around in the air of your home!
The two and a half gallon bucket kits can fit on a porch, patio, fire escape, or backyard. Despite how little space they take up, Lawson says they produce quite a bit of food. “I want them to feel like a viable food source for people, so I take that into account—pricing, the size of the kit, the species that I choose. I want it to be something that people can actually cook for their family.”
Fungal Focus kits include oyster and shiitake mushrooms, and can be bought in a series of CSA plans from May until November. The Fungal Focus Food Skills workshop will be free, and takes place April 19th at 6 p.m. at Han’s Kombucha at 370 W. Aspen Avenue. Sign up here. The next workshop will involve Drupefruit, a local maker of shrubs—that is, elixirs of vinegar, sugar, and preserved fruit that can be made and used in a multitude of ways.
Phoenix oyster mushroom growing from a Fungal Focus pot. Courtesy of Fungal Focus.
Notes:
There’s a lot going on in SLC as spring approaches, so here’s a list of upcoming events and dates to pay attention to besides our first Food Skills workshop. If we forgot something, let us know! And feel free to reach out with resources you want on our radar at utahfoodcoalition@gmail.com.
Garden Prep!
Help Plant Based Utah and the Village Cooperative prep backyard garden beds this weekend, produce from which will be split—one third goes to volunteers and another third goes to local families in need (this year via Comunidades Unidas). Visit our instagram page for the link to sign up.
Utah Film Center presents Follow the Drinking Gourd
Starting April 19, you can reserve tickets to a free virtual streaming of Follow the Drinking Gourd, a documentary presented by Utah Film Center’s Black, Bold & Brilliant film series. The film focuses on the Black food justice movement, and “connects the legacy of slavery, capitalism, and climate change to our fight for food security.” It features notable appearances from the likes of author Leah Penniman (Farming While Black), and will be followed by a roundtable discussion with local farmers of color and representatives from the Mobile Moon Coop. The film is available to stream April 19-25 or until all tickets are reserved, whichever happens first.
Celebrate Community Gardens on Earth Day
Residents of Rose Park or anyone passionate about community gardens will be excited to hear that Wasatch Community Gardens has plans to install a new garden in the neighborhood, and you can learn all about it on Friday, April 22nd from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Rose Park Neighborhood Center (754 N. 8th West). There will be ice cream for kiddos, a community resource fair and giveaways. Plus, Utah Food Coalition will have a table, so you can say hi!
CSA Season
With the end of the Winter Market on April 23rd and a whole month and a half-ish between now and the start of the summer farmer’s market, we’ve got time to think about the best way to get local food this summer. For some people, visiting the Saturday market at Pioneer Park or the Thursday evening markets at Liberty Park is perhaps not workable with schedules, geography, etc. We get it! But fresh, local food can still be had by joining a community supported agriculture program! If you’ve never joined a CSA program, it involves paying up front for a share of that farm's seasonal harvest, which gives farmers cash ahead of their harvest to maintain their operation through the season. Animalia was kind enough to create a list of Salt Lake City CSA programs to join, and you can find it here, with links to all those mentioned.
Get Bulk at the Neighborhood Hive
Fans of shopping bulk and especially of doing it with local downtown market Hello Bulk will be thrilled to see another leg of the business posted up with goods at the newly opened Neighborhood Hive in Sugar House (2065 E. 2100 South). The locals-focused market also features vendors of of handcrafted goods and food.
Stop Food Waste Day
April 27 is Stop Food Waste Day, and if you too feel weird about how many coffee grounds or veggie scraps you’re tossing in the trash, here are some resources for learning more about food waste and how to combat it.
Waste Less Solutions is hosting a Food Waste Warrior Mixer at Bewilder Brewing Co on Thursday, April 21 ahead of Stop Food Waste Day for anyone to learn about food waste and how Waste Less helps to rescue food from donors to then give to community members in need. Visit their website to register for the mixer and to see their other services and programs.
Head out behind Animalia and you can drop any of your gathered food waste in their collection buckets, which unlike typical compost bins, are going to Momentum Recycling’s new food waste program that converts food waste into natural gas. This gas can then be used to heat homes around the valley. You can also sign up to have your own bucket at your residence. Animalia just asks a small payment of a few cents to help cover the cost of their buckets with each gallon of dropped off waste. Find more info on Instagram or their website.
There are also more standard resources for dealing with your food waste, including composting. You can sign up for a compost bin at your residence through the city here, or learn about how to tend your own pile through resources available from Wasatch Community Gardens.
That’s all folks! We hope you found this rather large notes section helpful, and our info about mushrooms with Fungal Focus illuminating. Stay tuned next month for our Food Skills chat with Drupefruit about the joys of vinegar and preserved fruits!
Shiitake mushroom grown by Fungal Focus. Courtesy of Fungal Focus.