Because you don’t land a huge contract by taking your client out for a big steaming pile of mushrooms.
I see no claims in that article that they’re a superfood. I’m not even sure what you mean by ‘superfood’. Many dubious claims are made about the nutritional benefits of many food items and supplements, citing things like ‘fighting free radicals’ and ‘supporting the immune system’, which are meaningless buzzwords.
Me, I like mushrooms because they’re tasty as hell. Nutritionally, they’re better than must stuff americans eat, but they’re not going to turn anyone’s health around. Eat a balanced diet for maximum benefit.
[sub]Whenever I hear ‘superfood’ I can’t help but recall the old cartoon where Mighty Mouse got all his powers from being trapped in a supermarket, and eating all the super food there![/sub]
No. Many are tasty and safe; many are deadly. It’s often very easy to confuse species between the two which is why wild mushroom harvesters need to know what they’re doing. The margin of error is pretty small.
From what I understand, the bulk of wild mushrooms aren’t good to eat or deadly.
We had home-made mushroom pizza for dinner last night. I’m not the world’s biggest mushroom fan, but I do eat them.
One unexpected nutritional benefit – mushrooms that are exposed to sunlight* have high levels of vitamin D. The Ergosterol that strengthens the cell walls is chemically very similar to the cholesterol in animals that is the precursor to vitamin D. In both cases, exposure to ultraviolet light turns it into vitamin D.
The ergopsterol transforms into Vitamin D2, while the 7-dehydrocholesterol in your skin makes Vitamin D3. Both work the same in human bodies, helping the body build bones, among other things, and preventing rickets. One weird fact is that D2 does NOT prevent rickets in chickens, while D3 does. That’s one of the clues that lead to distinguishing the two.
*Or you can expose it to ultraviolet light. Since commercial mushrooms are usually grown in the dark, they’re vitamin-D deficient unless exposed to sunlight or ultraviolet light. If you use flashlamps – the business I’m in, now, which is how I know all this – the exposure of only a fraction of a second is equivalent to many minutes of exposure to sunlight or standard UV lamps.
One trick we use to reduce our consumption of meat is to make 100% mushroom cheese steaks (sans meat). When we do, we try to use vegan cheese, which is surprisingly good these days, for the full vegan experience. If the mushrooms are cooked and seasoned right, it is an almost perfect combination of flavor and consistency of a Philadelphia cheese steak. Honest.
No, broccoli isn’t popular because it feels weird in your mouth and tastes like chlorophilled ass.
BTW, the America Test Kitchen’s podcast "Proof"has an excellent episode on mushrooms and mushroom growers in Africa. Apparently its a good startup business to help impoverished people make a living.
We collect and eat mushrooms we can positively identify. We belong to a mushroom club, do spore prints, etc. The only ones we bring home are either known species we’ve eaten before, or interesting species we want to spore print and photograph.
I know an area where Amanita species pop up each spring and have collected them to bring to meetings so people can check them out.
While I agree wholeheartedly with your appraisal of broccoli, I have to point out that some people seem to be genetically predisposed to love it. My dear wife, Pepper Mill, who shares many of my tastes, is a confirmed Broccoli-eater. She passed this abominable trait on to our daughter. The first “adult” food she ate was a floret of broccoli that she grabbed from Pepper Mill’s salad, munching it with gusto and with a smile on her face.
Genetics is a harsh taskmaster.
Thing about advertising is that someone with a lot of money has got to pay for it. So most advertising you’ll see will be for branded goods (which mushrooms aren’t) or, occasionally, by large organisations which represent certain farmers.
I doubt something like ‘The American Mushroom Institute’ has the funds for advertising. Too niche, not enough members.
What would you be replacing? No foods are inherently healthy for humans, we need a mixed diet, so when evaluating the benefits of a food you have to look at whether it has benefits if added in the small amounts you can add without removing something, or if it has more benefits than the things you would be removing.
They can replace some meat in your diet, but have a lot less protein and cost the same as cheap ground beef. You could add them to your vegetable mix, but other than the protein they don’t stand out in any way as a vegetable substitute.
Unless your client is a hobbit.
You’s be wrong.
There’s an entire magazine – Mushroom News, put out by the American Mushroom Institute. It’s a slick monthly running about 40 pages, filled with ads directed to people who produce mushrooms.
We’ve got back issues stashed in the magazine racks where I work.
Naw, I like mushrooms, but they (and broccoli) don’t have the innate, easy yumminess that sugar has. Nor meat.
Mushrooms could become a fad, like kale. But they’ll never have the mass appeal of sugar or meat.
I’ve never seen fresh porcini anywhere, and had understood you could only buy them dried. 
Broccoli is reasonably tasty if you turn it into soup, with plenty of butter and chicken stock and cream and possibly some cheddar.
Then again, that soup might be even better with the broccoli left out.
That explains the prices, then… but I see you are in California, and I understand there is at least some crop in Oregon, California, Colorado, British Columbia, etc., maybe some other places? I bet a gourmet market / “upscale” grocery store near you has them, or you can order some, if you are willing to pay the $40 per pound or whatever it’s going to cost this year. They are also sometimes sold frozen, and of course there are the dried Italian ones.
You need to get on more outdoor type mailing lists. It’s morel season, and every other article is about them.
Many mushrooms like morels and truffles are difficult to cultivate, making them expensive and/or rare.
Current thread mentions mushroom ketchup.
We saw a wild-mushroom harvest scene in Oregon mountains somewhere north of Jphn Day IIRC. Many migrant families brought their pickings into town to a dozen or more buyers’ trucks. Hopefully they identified the fungi correctly.
The 99 Ranch Market E.Asian chain (US northeast, west coast, Texas) sells oodles of odd fresh fungi, as do many Chinese markets I’ve seen. I’ve shopped San Francisco’s Chinese markets for dried 'shrooms and black fungi at low prices. They last forever, reconstitute readily, and are fine for stews, sauces, curries, etc.
Search on GROW MUSHROOMS AT HOME if price is an issue.
Publishing a magazine targeted primarily at the trade is a little different from a mass market consumer campaign though, which is what you’d need to do if you want to affect consumer eating habits.
Other than that, you could sign up a few influencer chefs to start cooking lots of dishes with mushrooms.
As I understand it, most wild mushrooms are fine to eat, and of those that aren’t, most are only inedible because they’re too tough or the like, and of those that are toxic, most won’t give you much worse than a tummyache the day after you eat them.
But the catch is that a few of them will leave you dying over the course of a very agonized week, with no cure or treatment possible. And some of those very-toxic ones look fairly similar to some that are safe and tasty. You can’t just assume, “Well, this looks a lot like that one, and that one is good, so this one probably is, too”.
Oh, and mushrooms are OK as long as they don’t have too much mushroom flavor, but broccoli is delicious, raw or cooked (as long as it’s cooked properly!).