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InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,504
'The Indiana Jones of mushrooms'
    #4760848 - 10/05/05 09:17 PM (18 years, 5 months ago)

'The Indiana Jones of mushrooms'
October 5, 2005 - cfbf.com

For mushroom farmer Malcolm Clark, zigzagging the world in search of undiscovered species of mushrooms is something akin to hunting down the lost Ark of the Covenant.

It is no wonder that the globetrotting, fungal-seeking adventurer has often been called "the Indiana Jones of mushrooms," a nickname that has trailed him for a number of years.

"It's always difficult to find out who started the rumor, but I think it was my teenage niece who said to her friends, ?Oh, you've got to meet my uncle. He's neat. He's the Indiana Jones of mushrooms,'" said Clark. "I think she had visions of me wearing a hat with a machete chopping through the jungles. That has happened, but not very often."

Although he has never been chased by Nazis or giant rolling boulders, Clark has not necessarily avoided cliffhanger moments while collecting exotic mushroom samples for his company, Gourmet Mushrooms Inc., which he founded in 1977 with partner David Law.

The Sonoma County-based company specializes in an array of wild forest mushroomsones that typically grow on dead or dying wood. To reproduce them, the company uses a technique that involves sawdust, other organic materials and state-of-the-art equipment, all of which create a compatible growing habitat for the fungi.

With business 'shrooming, the company expanded to its 43,000-square-foot facility in Sebastopol more than two years ago and has now tripled its production to about 10,000 pounds of organic mushrooms a week. The company also is in the business of selling growing kits to entrepreneurs who want to grow their own exotic mushrooms.

Whether Clark is traipsing through the rain forests of Bali or exploring the depths of Peru, he is relentlessly on the lookout for more wild mushroom varieties that he can bring home and reproduce on his mushroom farm.

"I'm looking everywhere I go. It's something you just can't get away from," he said. "I'm very much into nature from the standpoint that I like hiking and camping and things like that, so I'm always out there and I do that in other countries when I get the opportunity. That's often where mushrooms are."

More often than not, his discoveries come about when he's simply driving along somewhere and spots a specimen too good to pass up. As an orchid hobbyist, Clark has another advantage: Usually where orchids grow, mushrooms are nearby.

"It's knowing where an environment is, especially this mushroom from Nepal," said Clark, handing over a small glass vial containing a preserved specimen that resembles a cross between a short, knobby branch and a worm.

He recalled the great lengths he went through to collect samples of the specimenthe Cordyceps sinensis, also known as the caterpillar mushroom. The peculiar fungus can be found in the highlands of Nepal, China and Tibet, usually above 10,000 feet, and has been used as a medicinal herb for more than 2,000 years in the Far East.

"We went through high elevations of the Himalayan Mountains to arrive at an area escorted by local Nepalese, who had been collecting it there a thousand years," Clark said. "But to get there was an incredible feat. It was so high you can't breathe, and I was the oldest member of the expedition."

Considered one of the most beneficial mushrooms, along with the reishi and shiitake mushrooms, the Cordyceps sinensis has long fascinated Clark and is now one of more than 500 mushroom species found in Gourmet Mushrooms' fungal culture collection.

"There may be several strains of the same species but collected from different areas," Clark said. "That is very important. This is germplasm inventory, not just for the mushrooms that we grow but now for other people like Hamakua Mushrooms in Hawaii, which is a successful operation."

Out of that vast fungal culture bank, the company currently produces six main culinary varieties, including the Trumpet Royale, Baby Oyster Clusters, Brown Clamshell, Alba Clamshell, Cinnamon Cap and Forest Nameko, all of which are sold directly to chefs nationwide and in specialty grocers such as Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe's under the brand name Mycopia. Another two or three varieties are on the way, said Law.

"The key thing we look at when we develop new mushrooms to grow is shelf life, texture and flavor," Clark said. "Shelf life is very important. There are some mushrooms that we could grow that are wonderful to eat, but we don't grow them because they only last two days."

Inside the Sebastopol farm, hundreds of thousands of mushrooms are "blooming" in meticulously controlled harvest rooms that mimic the growing environment of the exotic fungi. Unlike the familiar white button mushrooms that grow on manure beds, the company's exotic varieties are grown in bottles packed with a nutrient-rich sawdust mixture specially formulated for commercial cultivation.

"So what we've done is taken charge of the situation," Clark said. "We take this piece of wood from the forest, but we formulate it in such a way that we've added lots of goodies to it. It might be corn bran or wheat bran. We've made a boring meal of sawdust and enriched it by adding all sorts of goodies to it, and the mushrooms love this."

The sawdust comes from area vineyards, which supply the mushroom operation with oak shavings from their wine barrels. At the end of the mushroom-growing process, the used sawdust mixture goes back to the vineyards, where it is used to fertilize the grapevines.

"So we have a complete ecological cycle," said Clark.

Once the mushrooms are in the harvest rooms, it is only a matter of hours before they are hand-plucked and packaged. The whole process begins with the mushrooms starting as little spawn eating their way through the sawdust substrate.

"This is where the spores happen to land on a log, a dead piece of wood," Clark said. "The spores would get in and germinate and start to form mycelium. So imagine this teeny-tiny sporeeach mushroom has several millionmating with another spore. You'll see little strands of mycelium start to come out. Those strands grow like mold until they finally take over. When you see mushrooms on the ground, that's what's going on."

Although the growing cycle of each mushroom is different, the whole process usually takes about three months to complete. During that time, the bottles sit in a warehouse setting where thousands of other bottles are in various stages of development.

Having perfected this growing technique, Clark has earned a steadfast reputation as a pioneer in exotic mushroom cultivation. He was the first to commercially grow shiitake mushrooms in the Western Hemisphere, and for the first 10 to 12 years, the company's main focus was shiitakes.

But as shiitakes became more common in the market and other producers were growing them, Clark and Law began shifting their focus to more exotic species. Today, the company divides its efforts between the culinary arts and pharmaceuticals.

It is the medicinal potential of fungi that first captivated Clark and Law and inspired the two to form their partnership.

"But that was never going to pay the bills back in the beginning," Clark said. "The culinary side is the exciting side, the romantic side, like wine. But the serious side is the nutraceutical side."

That side of the business involves some 37 different mushroom varieties used to make nutritional supplements. A sister company in Europe, Mycology Research Laboratories, takes the raw materials produced at Gourmet Mushrooms and processes them into capsules and tablets. These products have now become mainstream in Europe, Clark said, and are commonly found in European hospitals and clinics.

"If I were to guess, I would say David and I would probably not be in this business if it weren't for the medicinal potential of thisbecause we're both scientists," said Clark.

They like to call themselves "pharmers" because they're scientists who became farmers, Law said.

Specifically, Clark is a biologist. As a young man, his hunger for adventure led him to work as a sea diver in Portugal and later as a poisonous snake collector in Kenya. In the early 1970s, Clark, who is British, became a student of the late Tsuneto Yoshii, a world-renowned authority in the area of mycology, the study of fungi.

"The company is very much still attached to that philosophy and the institute," Clark said. "David and I took that basic information and we brought it to the West. We were able to extend it, manipulate it in such a way as to make it more presentable to a Western audience. That was often our roadmap, to be able to decide what mushroom we would be trying to grow next."

Law, a native of Hong Kong who has an academic background in biochemistry and business, met Clark through a mutual friend in 1976 and the two quickly bonded over their mutual enchantment with the mushroom. As president and chief executive officer of Gourmet Mushrooms, Law manages the financial functions of the company and the marketing of the mushroom products.

Clark considers himself semi-retired and maintains the title of chairman of the company. When he's not on expeditions collecting mushroom specimens, he does consulting worldwide and speaks at national and international conferences on the subject. He acknowledged that mycology is not a well-known science and there is still much to learn about the medicinal uses of mushrooms.

"A medical student in her fourth year recently asked me, "But what is a mushroom pill going to do for you?'" Clark said. "So I had to remind her of penicillin and streptomycin and all of those others that are all fungi. Once she heard that, the light went on and she was able to tie in similarities."

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