Mandate on mushrooms in Calaveras County

Mandate on mushrooms in Calaveras County
Calaveras County officials say wild variety can't be sold at farmers markets

By Dana M. Nichols
August 22, 2009
Record Staff Writer

MURPHYS - A wild-mushroom vendor and the manager of the Murphys farmers market say they are dismayed by a Calaveras County Environmental Health Department order halting the sale of wild-harvested mushrooms at the Thursday afternoon market.

"I think it's a tragedy," said Eric Taylor, manager of the market and also a produce grower who sells there. "I hope we can work through it. I think they are an important resource for people, and they are a really great local food."

County officials say they were simply enforcing state law and ensuring the safety of food sold to the public when they told vendor Gabe Bridges of Avery in early August that he could no longer sell wild mushrooms at the market.

"Mushrooms being gathered on forestland is not an approved source," said Brian Moss, director of Calaveras County's Environmental Management Agency, which oversees the Environmental Health Department. Similarly, a person who gathers wild food rather than growing it on land he or she controls is not a producer and cannot be certified under California law, Moss said.

The mushrooms at markets debate has been simmering for decades, at the same time that California and other states to the north have developed an industry of people who commercially gather wild mushrooms in national forests and Bureau of Land Management areas.

"I actually got kicked out of the farmers market ... about 20 years ago because of this," said Eric Schramm, owner of Mendocino Mushroom Co. in Fort Bragg. Schramm's company now ships about 60,000 pounds a year of wild-harvested mushrooms, including lucrative matsutake mushrooms to Japan.

A survey of farmers market managers around California found that markets in different regions handle wild foods differently. In some cases, foods such as wild-caught fish and wild mushrooms are strictly banned, while in other cases they are allowed, although sometimes through a legal loophole.

The Southland Farmers Market Association, which operates more than a dozen markets from Los Angeles to San Diego, worked out a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" mushroom policy after Los Angeles County health officials in 2005 initially banned wild mushrooms at markets, Southland Executive Director Howell Tumlin said.

"The compromise that was reached in Los Angeles County was that t