I first remember picking Tanoak mushrooms (Matsutake's for those not from the northern California coastal area) when I was around five years old. Picking mushrooms is one of those childhood memories of the fun and excitement that now as an adult, I wish to pass on to my children. If you read too much of the news, it is inherently scary and risky, but I knew how to identify the correct mushrooms when I was five, so it cannot be that hard right?
I took my wife and two young kids this year to pick Tanoak mushrooms for the first time on Thanksgiving day - my sons are two and six months, so I had the two-year-old in a backpack and my wife had our baby in a bjorn. We were joined by my older brother with his three kids (6,11, and 13) and my old man (Pops to the McKnight family). We went to our favorite patch of tanoak trees and started wandering up the hills looking for the elusive mushrooms.
Back in the old days, around 1990, you could go out and pick garbage bags full of mushrooms and it seemed like there were as many as you wanted. My family has gone out picking tanoak mushrooms for generations, but then in the mid-90's we had buyers come into town. It seemed that the local tanoak mushroom was the same as the Matsutake craved by the people of Japan for some reason, but more importantly at the time, they were paying big money for good mushrooms! Being one of the few families in the area that had always been harvesting mushrooms, usually for our Thanksgiving gravy and always for personal consumption, we had an immediate benefit of being able to find and sell mushrooms for what seemed to be astronomical prices. It was great as a 12 year-old kid to go out for a short afternoon jaunt with my parents and sell what I collected for several hundred dollars. Even better, they mainly wanted buttons and paid little for the big steaklike tanoaks, so we always took those home for a fry after picking. Everything tastes better when you have loads of cash in your pocket! Of course, eventually the "professional" pickers found almost every patch of tanoak mushrooms, and raked the leaves from the top to the bottom of each hill, ruining future crops to the point we are at now.
Where are we at now? Instead of walking the hillside and gathering a sack full of tanoak mushrooms in an hour, we hiked back and forth and up and down a hillside for several hours to get 2-3 mushrooms each. Amazingly, my two year-old was still excited every time I stopped to check if the mushroom poking out of the dirt was one of our elusive matsutakes. Like my father before me, I tried my best to teach him the difference between the good mushrooms and the numerous non-good mushrooms. He won't remember all of it this year, or maybe even next year, but I hope that when he is five he will be able to easily identify the correct mushrooms as I was. We also practice the techniques as Pops taught me - knock the top of the mushroom to knock any potential spores on the ground after you pick, push the leaves back over the ground when you pick, and do not take the little baby buttons, let them grow. Little things, but little things that we know from family history over successive generations in the same area that will ensure a better harvest in years to come.
Slowly but surely, the Tanoak mushroom is coming back into our family tanoak patch. Hopefully, with no huge spike in Matsutake prices, our little forest will be allowed to recover and I can show my sons a good mushroom harvest, and give them the memories to pass on to another generation.
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