Can mushrooms save the world? This Ontario farmer thinks so
Mushrooms are a booming business for wellness, industry and, of course, food
Murray Good truly believes mushrooms can save the world.
"They're not here by accident," he says. "I believe mushrooms can heal the Earth and heal humanity."
The mushroom farmer and owner of Whitecrest Mushrooms in Putnam, Ont., has been growing fungus for 20 years and says, we, as a species, are just starting to see the potential in the mycelium that grows beneath our feet.
He grows more than 40,000 pounds of mushrooms every week — the equivalent of an unloaded tractor trailer and demand keeps climbing, especially when it comes to the specialty mushrooms like lion's mane that have become all the rage in health circles because of the long-held belief they have medicinal benefits.
A growing business in specialty mushrooms
"They were usually around eight to 10 per cent of the market. They are now increasing to 12 to 15 per cent. So they're really kind of they are coming into their time and, from a culinary point of view, they carry a lot of different flavours."
The lion's mane mushroom is white and looks like a shaggy truffle. Long prized in Chinese medicine as a brain tonic, 21st-century science is just starting to give it its due.
A recent study out of the University of Queensland found the mushroom improved nerve growth, improved memory and could prevent some neuro-degenerative disorders, such as dementia.
Good grows them, powders them and puts them in capsules, which are sold as a mental wellness product to be taken as micro-doses to help improve brain health.
It's just one of an ever-expanding list of products where mushrooms play a key role.
Good's mushrooms are used in dog food and human food alike, as a way to stretch meat, making it moist, giving it more volume and enriching it with nutrients. Believe it or not, mycelium has also been used for the backseat of a Mercedez Benz prototype — as a leather.
WATCH | Why Murray Good thinks mushrooms can save the world:
Good isn't the only farmer in the business. Shogun Maitake, which recently opened in London, Ont., grows maitake mushrooms that are used as a gourmet ingredient in some of North America's top restaurants and what isn't eaten is powered and taken as a wellness capsule thanks to the maitake's long-standing reputation as a cancer killer.
Aside from a slight dip during the pandemic, mushroom sales in Canada have seen steady growth since 2016, according to Statistics Canada. In 2021, mushroom farmers produced 151,894 tons of mushrooms, which translated into $654 million in sales with a significant portion exported to the United States.
Mushroom boom based in ancient and pop culture
Greg Thorn, an associate professor of biology at Western University, who has studied mushrooms for decades, said Canada as a culture is just starting to recognize the healing properties of fungi.
"Much of Canada was settled by people that had kind of a a longstanding dislike or, aversion to mushrooms. They were often called toad stools," he said. "You wouldn't want to eat that, something that sounded like that. It's taken us time and multiculturalism to to help get us out of that."
Thorn said the influx of Asian cultures, where mushrooms are prized both as a medicine and a delicacy have certainly helped, but so has the power of popular movies — such as Fantastic Fungi.
"It played on Netflix to a whole lot of audiences and people were wowed by the, you know, the excitement of mushrooms and their the potential of their medicinal applications."
Thorn said when it comes to health, science still needs to catch up with ancient cultural teachings that mushrooms are a boon for human health. As for the industrial applications of fungi, he said that's purely a modern idea.
"Most of these are from this century," he said. "So the idea that you could grow leather out of mushrooms or grow bacon out of mushrooms, that's all pretty new, but there's a huge market."
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