LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE - Mushrooms are weird. They’re not a plant nor, technically, a vegetable. They are a fungus that is as close as we get to eating the Earth itself.
While the grocery aisle makes us most accustomed to cooking white buttons or brown portobellos, the colors, shapes, tastes and textures across the kingdom can vary widely. Looked at in detail, they can present an almost multisensory form resembling foodstuff of the aliens we now “know” are among us.
But at Smallhold, an indoor mushroom farm southeast of downtown L.A., they are also the future.
Danielle Stevenson, a PhD candidate in environmental toxicology at UC Riverside, has worked with Smallhold to take its spent mushroom fruiting blocks and introduce them in contaminated sites throughout Los Angeles to measure levels of toxins the mycelium have absorbed from the soil. The initial results were promising, especially considering that one mushroom can be part of an underground mycelial network that spans acres.