Canada: Take a Winter Mushroom Walk Around Vancouver With Kitsilano’s Resident Mycologist
You don’t have to be a master mycologist to eat wild mushrooms safely, Arevalo says.
By Niko Bell
Montecristo Magazine
Feb 4, 2021
Excerpt:
Arevalo, a mostly self-taught mycologist and artist, has been fascinated with fungi since he was four years old, when he first hunted them in the redwood forests around Arcata, California. Now he is a resident mycologist at Vancouver’s Kitsilano Community Centre, where he designs fungal art and ecological projects with his partner and collaborator Isabelle Kirouac.
In February, Arevalo and Kirouac will be leading an online mushroom cooking class; in March, translating the electrical signals from fungi into music as a songwriting inspiration. At a secondary school in North Vancouver, they are helping kids build a labyrinth out of wood chips and log rounds that are alive with mushroom mycelium.
Arevalo encourages anyone to take a fungi walk in the woods, as long as explorers respect the mushrooms, the land, and the people who live there. He encourages wanderers to learn to harvest mushrooms in ways and quantities that preserve the species, as well as to learn from local Indigenous peoples, respect their resource-gathering customs, and give back to their communities.
Mushroom walkers should also be careful not to excessively disturb soil, where every footprint can land on kilometres of threadlike mycelium. Parks are off limits, though, and removing mushrooms from them can come with a heavy fine.
