OurGoods

Our 1st class with Trade School teacher Gary Lincoff

We couldn’t fit any more students in the room at Trade School last night! Nearly thirty people showed up to listen to Gary Lincoff speak about foraging for mushrooms. The table was piled high with every kind of bought and foraged mushroom from students in exchange for Gary’s stories of thirty years of mushroom hunting in NYC.

Here are some highlights from my notebook:

“You actually can forage in the grocery store. Go to Chinatown, to the farmer’s market, to whole foods, and other places that sell mushrooms… hunt for variation in species, cultural value, AND cash price.”

“Mushrooms are older than us, older than animals, older than plants. They saw the dinosaurs come and go. But we know VERY little about mushrooms. We only have common names for a handful of mushrooms, yet most people are familiar with the common names of ten times as many flowers.”

“Get down and crawl through a patch of grass in Central Park. You will find more mushrooms if you move slowly and really look.”

I asked Gary why he was interested in Trade School.

His response: “I got a lot of barter out of the session: I met all those people, that’s a lot to get in exchange. Imagine meeting the same number of people randomly chosen on the street. You see, this was an interested audience wanting to hear about mushrooms, and that’s a special treat in the city. Please thank them for me. If I had the time I would have liked to hear each and every one of their stories about why they were there.”

To keep in touch with Gary, follow the interdisciplinary group he’s part of called Strataspore and also The New York Mycological Society.