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Some manifestations of this are merely aesthetic, like the glossy magic-mushroom handbag in the fall 2020 Kate Spade collection or the New York jeweler Brent Neale Winston’s trippy pendants, evoking childhood nostalgia with a wink. In the East, mushrooms have always been prized, but only recently have they become objects of fascination in the West. (That is, if you can afford them: Prices for foraged Japanese matsutakes, which grow in pine forests and, like truffles, have thus far resisted attempts at commercial cultivation, hit $395 per pound in Tokyo last September.) For decades, diminutive button mushrooms - pallid and “bred for the back of a truck,” as Andrew Carter, the chief executive officer of Smallhold, describes them - have dominated American sales now, meatier species like shiitakes, hen of the woods and wild matsutakes are increasingly finding a place on the table.
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In the United States, the boom may be credited in part to the beginnings of a shift toward less meat-heavy diets but also to the broadening of the American palate to embrace the Japanese notion of umami, the flavor beyond flavor: rich, carnal and briny at once, hinting at some dark ripening beneath the earth or sea. The market for edible fungi is projected to reach $69 billion worldwide by 2024, the biologist Merlin Sheldrake notes in “ Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures,” published this past spring. Still, the solemnity of the vitrines suggests a more complicated story, framing the mushrooms as art or sacred relics - or, in this high-design environment, luxury merchandise. It’s a glimpse of the future of agriculture, further collapsing the distance between diner and ingredients, doing away with the cost and waste of packaging and transportation in hopes of alleviating pressure on an overtaxed environment. At the Standard, where the crop goes into plates of chilaquiles and mushroom-infused bourbon cocktails, diners might stop midbite, look up and take note of their meal’s origins a few feet away.
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Thousands of data points - on temperature, humidity, airflow - are transmitted daily to the company’s headquarters, to be recalibrated across the network as needed. This isn’t décor, or only incidentally so the 15-foot-long shelf is a miniature farm, installed by the New York-based start-up Smallhold as part of a larger, sprawling system made up of remote-controlled nodes at restaurants and grocery stores across the city, each producing from 30 to 100 pounds of mushrooms a week. They are barely recognizable at first, just eerie silhouettes resembling coral growths in an aquarium, blooming in laboratory-teal light: tightly branched clusters of oyster mushrooms in hot pink, yolk yellow and bruise blue, alongside lion’s mane mushrooms, shaggy white globes with spines like trailing hair. The mushrooms sit on high, behind glass, above bottles of Armagnac and mezcal in a bar at the Standard hotel in Manhattan’s East Village.