News
In search of the Perfect Mushroom
by Roy Marshall
This article was published in Austin All Natural Magazine May 2010
In search of the perfect mushroom
Having been raised in a world when TV dinners were introduced, my culinary experiences as a youth in the fifties and sixties were limited. Working parents, a fend for yourself attitude, a largesse of fast food and I soon developed into a well rounded figure of a teenager. Then in late 1969 I had to do a report on the FDA for a class. That report opened my eyes and changed forever how I look at food. To this day, much of my online computer time is given over to researching the additives that are currently allowed into our food supply.
As I grew older, my life’s path took me toward restaurants, and it was there that I began to kindle an appreciation for finer foods. Working in a kitchen where all the foods are made from scratch, with no processed products ever allowed was something that I took for granted that all restaurants did. And it was how I cooked myself for my family. Learning the hard way that convenience and “FAKE” foods not only predominate the restaurant scene now as well as line the shelves of the local grocer was a revelation to me, and not a good one either. I have had the chance to taste things made with these prepared ingredients, canned salty chicken stocks, instant gravies and sauces, and just a whole host of things that could easily be made from scratch using the simplest of ingredients. When I read what is added to these convenience foods, I am shocked. Why is there textured soy protein in chicken tenders? Or 600 milligrams of salt in a single half cup serving of fake instant pepper gravy? Why? Convenience for the small time restaurant and of course for the busy parents buying foods laced with FDA approved toxins that are given the stamp of approval by daily bombardment of clever jingles and healthy actors mouthing platitudes from carefully worded scripts.
So I search for that which is the most difficult to find, a perfect mushroom. It is a parable, an impossibility. Today, as never before, that perfection that I seek cannot exist. The medium in which mushrooms are raised came from animals fed plants that were raised using methods that can never be truly free of the toxins let loose by our modern technological society. Acid rain to some degree covers the earth, and with it comes a deluge of chemicals and toxins. Genetically modified plants are transferring their new DNA into the bacteria that live within our own digestive tracks and creating no one knows what new monsters. A single perfect mushroom, that simple structure that is the flower of one of the most basic and simplest life forms on our planet is not possible to find anymore. Not a perfect one. Yet I continue to read, and to write, and to attempt to educate those within my sphere of influence that indeed it is out there, it is just up to us to work together to bring the environment around us back to a state where we could procure such an elusive visage. And sadly, it begins with eating real food, so that producers will not have buyers for all that fake, chemical laced, genetically modified poison.
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