“Pennsylvania is amazing. Like, Pennsylvania is a national treasure.”
William Padilla-Brown is talking about mushrooms here — really all manner of wild edibles found scattered throughout the ancient woods that gave the commonwealth half its name.
Padilla-Brown is a foraging guru, budding mycological influencer, and one in a wave of eco-entrepreneurs of color urging a collective recalibration of maybe the most fundamental aspects of earthly existence: what we consume to live and heal and how we get it.
Distilling his bio into a single (long) paragraph might be impossible, but I’m going to try:
Padilla-Brown was an Army brat who roved the planet before putting roots down in Cumberland County when his father retired from the service there. With his grandfather dying of cancer, a young William discovered the medicinal properties of cannabis and, in turn, the natural world’s various skeleton keys — tools capable of unlocking a wide array of physiological responses, including with his own persistent stomach troubles, he says. He set out to learn everything he could about fungi and flora, devouring books, cornering experts at conferences, and eventually building a reputation as a self-taught citizen scientist. That would lead to his own “decentralized” research business, MycoSymbiotics, based out of an eco-village-in-progress in an abandoned Harrisburg high school.
There were lots of earned media along the way.
Over the course of the hour he spent talking with PA Local, Padilla-Brown sounded like Timothy Leary’s Mechanicsburg cousin, urging folks to tune in to the liminal spaces all around us, turn on by quite literally — in internet parlance — touching some grass, and dropping out of our cloistered lives to find and eat something off the forest floor.
He says we’re in the right place for it, continuing to wax on the virtues of Penn’s woods:
“We don’t get forest fires or earthquakes. There’s literally spring water shooting out of the sides of mountains, even when it’s dry. You can go to these spring ecologies and find mushrooms, edible plants, and also, because we’re part of the original colonies and because of the emphasis on colonization here, so many people from around the world have brought their food here.”
He expands on this:
“We’ve got all sorts of Chinese edibles. All sorts of European edibles. We’ve got watercress, wineberries, all sorts of mulberries, cherries, ramps, and garlic. We have reishi, cordyceps, chaga, porcini — every mushroom you can think of. Chanterelles! We have truffles that people don’t even know about. We got so caught up in our hubris that we started cultivating European truffles here before we realized there were native truffles!”
He’s often asked about magic mushrooms, to which he deadpans “all mushrooms are magic.” (He’s particularly partial to cordyceps, a class that includes the “zombie fungus” from The Last of Us and photos of hijacked, Gwar-ish-looking insect bodies like these.)
But the man knows his way around a psychedelic experience, having done consulting work on the subject in states where psilocybin is newly decriminalized. Pennsylvania — despite its abundance of potent wild psychedelic mushrooms — is very much not one of those states, and his business is on the up-and-up, focused on researching new uses for legal ‘shrooms and turning them into mail-order products that “support overall health and wellbeing.”
Pennsylvania isn’t particularly New Agey, and a foundational reevaluation of food and medicine chains may seem implausible in a place that often looks like this. But Padilla-Brown says a little time away from our indoor routines would do us good, adding: "This is literally the fucking meaning of life. If people are questioning what’s real in this world of screens, you need to go outside."
Convenience culture, work ethic, the postmodern condition … Padilla-Brown is one in a very resolute group of people who unflinchingly believe a parallel universe — slower, happier, healthier — is out there, right there, in fact, behind the treeline.
If you don’t believe him, there’s a chance to find out. A few weeks from now, in August, Padilla-Brown will lead another sojourn into the woods, this one for the 9th annual MycoFest in State College. The hike is part of the days-long “mushroom and arts festival” that he founded. In past years, participants have found 200 to 300 types of mushrooms that are shared with inquiring local college students. There's only one caveat:
“I get so many people out in the woods and they’re like all right let’s go find the mushrooms and they’re going all fast. And I'm telling you that until you slow down you won't be able to understand the language of nature."
—Colin Deppen, Spotlight PA |
