The circuitous path to mycotecture
I am the Chief Technology Officer and a Co-Founder of a company called MycoWorks. We grow materials using the tissue of mushrooms, mycelium, an infinitely renewable alternative to leather, plastic foams, and other problematic commodities. The story of how I became a biotech entrepreneur follows a circuitous path.
My introduction to mushrooms came through my work at The Omega Institute, a new age sleep away camp for adults in upstate NY where I worked for a number of years in the 1980s. At Omega we cooked three vegetarian meals a day for up to 1000 people, buffet style, all made from raw and fresh ingredients. I started by washing dishes and eventually worked my way up to to being a chef. I designed menus, created recipes, and managed the operations of the kitchen and its extensive staff. It takes a lot of work to make enough food from scratch to serve 3000 meals a day. One of the biggest challenges was how to make vegetarian food taste interesting and complex day in and day out. There are many ways to go about this, some more time consuming and expensive than others.
One of the solutions, I soon discovered, was mushrooms. The flavors that mushrooms provide are both appealing and complex and their preparation was incredibly simple: all you have to do is sear them in a pan and you’re done. One of the other chefs taught me the basics of wild mushroom hunting in the extensive woods right outside the Omega kitchen. From him, I learned how to safely identify delicious edible species, the ones that can’t be cultivated and are sold in NYC for more per pound than the most expensive meats.
Wild mushrooms have flavors that are unlike anything one can get in the supermarket. There are mushrooms that have the flavor and texture of chicken, ones that taste like shrimp, ones that taste like crab, and even ones that taste like maple syrup. Going for a walk in the woods looking for mushrooms is different than just walking in the woods. It has purpose, meaning, and opens up possibilities for connection. I was hooked.
When searching for mushrooms it is important to notice as many factors as possible about the environment, both for purposes of identification and to help learn the conditions for future bounty. In the woods, I learned about the relation of environmental factors to mushroom physiology and development; in the kitchen, I learned how to quickly process large volumes of organic materials through physical transformations. The modern kitchen is a direct descendent of the wisdom imparted by Pasteur. Little did I know that in the practice of large scale vegetarian cooking, I was acquiring all of the basic skills needed for biotechnology system and process engineering: how to operate chopping and mixing machines, heating and pasteurization chambers, cooling techniques, the dynamics of acid and base treatments, additions and amendments, material transfer and containment, incubation of microbiota, and so on.
The education I received in mushroom identification and large scale vegetarian cooking set me on the path I am on today. The synthesis of these two bodies of knowledge — material processing and the modulation of environmental conditions — were central to the development of mycotecture, the idea that mushroom tissue can be grown into structural forms through biological system engineering.
