I spent a recent morning sitting with Cynthia Stancioff at her kitchen table in Chesterville with Ellie Sloane-Barton and Jula Moll-Rocek. As we discussed their foraging strategies, I worked my way through a plate of mushrooms Stancioff had just foraged. They were called lobster mushrooms, and the house filled with their scent as she cooked them on her stovetop with some butter.
They began discussing how easy it is to confuse edible and non-edible mushrooms. Stancioff flipped through a guidebook, pointing out what was edible and what wasn’t, and told me a story about how she once accidentally mixed up her mushroom varieties at a dinner party with friends.
Looking down at the plate, which was almost empty at that point, I began to feel a slight unease. I had eaten 15 slices of the mushroom.
Those who like to forage for wild mushrooms say hunting for them really puts the fun in fungi, but there are other ways to get mushrooms without accidentally poisoning yourself. In fact, Moll-Rocek said many farms have cropped up in the last five to 10 years that grow what he called “gourmet edible mushrooms.”
Though he commended the markets, he believes that foraging for mushrooms provides humans with a strong relationship with nature and pushes a different narrative that humans are not destroying the environment, but rather learning to live within it.
“There’s a lot of destruction being done, but offering this other pathway shows there’s another way to interact with the world,” he said. “It really improves our lives and is both delicious and medicinal.”
I thought a lot about Moll-Rocek’s words on my drive back to Lewiston from Chesterville. It takes about an hour, and though it was hot that day, I felt inspired to roll my windows down rather than run the car air conditioning to try to feel closer to nature. About 30 minutes into my drive I definitely felt a lot closer to nature, because I had to pull over and lie in a field to try to collect myself. The plate of mushrooms that I ate turned out to not sit so well with me.
I took the afternoon off and checked in with Maine Poison Control, which told me to lie down and take it easy. By the next day I was feeling mostly back to normal, except for my newfound distrust of the lobster mushroom.
Stancioff mentioned, after I finished the plate of mushrooms I was offered, that she normally recommends people eat a small bite and see if it sits well with them after a few hours. I recommend that too.
While I do not see myself foraging for mushrooms in the near future, or perhaps ever — unless there is some sort of apocalypse where I am forced to live off the land — I did come to appreciate the connections that the fungi have with the entire ecosystem.
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