It’s midday and I’m huddled in a 200 degree sauna across from a freestyle rapper with a penchant for mushroom-centric wordplay as he reels off ad lib after ad lib. This is the first part of a two part experiment – freestyling in the heat, then freestyling in an ice bath outside to see how the elements affect the delivery.
After a few bars in the sauna to warm up – okay, more like fire up since it was way past warm in there – I followed the lead of Fungi Flows and jumped in an ice bath out front of the sauna to deliver a series of sub-zero phrasings:
“In the Himalayas with the herb that’s fresh – my girl and I are kicking it like Shiva and Ganesh /
I’m chilling like Moses with the Burning Bush – sitting on a quarter pound of Hindu Kush”
The spontaneous spouting off from the ice bath was recorded for posterity and soon uploaded to Instagram, racking up 175,000 views and minting my first viral freestyle. Now I just need an emcee name – ‘MF Shroom’ was suggested by one of the commenters.
A First-of-Its-Kind Fungi Festival
The Western New York fungi festival kicked off its first edition from August 28 – 30 outside of Buffalo, New York, hosting an assortment of fungi workshops, educators, musical performances, and the myco-curious.
The festival had a unique offering that I haven’t seen elsewhere on the ever-expanding mushroom event circuit: a pair of mobile, wood-burning saunas with ice baths out front pumping 24/7. This novel addition to the festival programming functioned as a centerpiece to the social activities on offer; around the clock you could find people deep into a sauna sweat, lowering their core temperatures in the ice baths, and sweating out the chemical traces of last week’s bender.
I know for a fact that the old scare tactic of LSD flashbacks isn’t accurate, because I’d have been hallucinating far more extensively in the sauna than I was if that were the case.
The line between festival performers and attendees was erased in the dry heat cedar hot box, as it was elsewhere across the festival grounds; WNY Fungi Festival quickly established itself as a place where experts and novices broke bread together, where community and commerce effortlessly co-existed, and where science and art melded together.
Comedy, Ketamine, and Kicking Off the Weekend
I did a one hour mushroom comedy set to kick off the festivities on Friday afternoon at 12 pm, squeezing a surprisingly sizable crowd out of the first day of the fest. I never know the temperament of the audience I’m encountering when first performing in a new region with unfamiliar cultural norms and political leanings – are these people fringe lunatics like me who can appreciate a proper ribalding, or are they prudish self-righteous types who will revolt against anyone skewering the longstanding tradition of standing armies being high on various substances?
For example, ketamine was first rolled out as a field anesthetic for U.S. troops during the Vietnam War; imagine being wounded in a foxhole and getting dapped up with K from the field medic such that you’re now juggling being in a foxhole and a k-hole simultaneously! The joke landed – phew!
Charting New Territory with North American Truffles
Later on in the day, self-taught mycologist and truffle trailblazer William Padilla-Brown of MycoSymbiotics quite literally charted new scientific territory with his presentation on North American truffles. These mysterious and ancient aromatic subterranean fungi grow underground and have been widely celebrated in Europe, Africa, and the SWANA region for millennia. It turns out they also occur across North America, though there is no tradition here around them.
Only a small percentage of truffles are useful culinarily, but those that are possess a uniqueness of flavor and aroma profile that makes them extraordinarily in demand by gourmands and connoisseurs – some have the aroma of gasoline or old french fries while others come across with subtle coca and tobacco notes. When infused into foods such as Will is doing with Mr. Truff’s gourmet pop-up food cart, word spreads quickly and people line up 10 deep to grab their truffle burgers. It turns out that the majority of truffle dishes on the market, such as the ubiquitous ‘truffle oil fries’ that one often finds at bistros and breweries, are made using lab-derived synthetic truffle flavoring and not the real deal.
Growing Your Own: The DIY Mushroom Revolution
Throughout the weekend there were presentations on inoculating logs with edible fungi, properly hydrating and preparing grain spawn for mushroom cultivation, and other similar high value educational seminars leading people towards food security and better health.
If it wasn’t for turnkey exotic mushroom grow kits such as those proffered by Booming Acres, I wouldn’t even know that it was possible to grow mushrooms at home – but the fact is that the DIY mushroom revolution is here, and there’s room for everyone. Cost of groceries going sky high? Grow some Oysters, Lion’s Mane, and Pioppino!
Live Music and Freestyle Battles
The festival featured live music each afternoon and night, with the highlight surely being Fungi Flows popping off in his element on stage in a mushroom getup while freestyling based on words and ideas fed to him by the crowd. You know that your festival is lit when you’ve got a dude dressed as a mushroom freestyle battling a drone circling him on stage with bars that challenge the perceived terminator-style robot takeover.
“If AI is coming for all the jobs, I feel like I’m safe up here, because who really wants to see a robot try to spit bars in a mushroom fit like this?!” says the witty rapper in between beats.
Turning a Passion into a Paycheck
KK of Flora Funga Podcast rounded out the festival keynote programming with a talk on ‘Nerdy Jobs’, sharing insights into how people can get paid to pursue their love of mushrooms and biology. I personally had no idea that anyone was getting paid for working with mushrooms, I naturally assumed it was a volunteer job with compensation coming in the form of Instagram clout.
I’ve never been to Burning Man, and I intend to keep that record intact – if the goal is radical self-expression, creativity, and resourcefulness, the Western New York Fungi festival has all the bases covered and then some. I’ve already blocked off the dates for next year’s fest, and the invitation is extended to come join us. We’ll keep the fires tended and the beat going in the sauna, and when you’re ready, you can hop in the cypher and be part of the action.
