I had been preparing for a summer of field work studying foraged desert plants in a remote part of Australia when the pandemic hit, and my travel plans were abruptly frozen. It was March, right before morel mushrooms emerge in central Pennsylvania. I wasn't doing a lot other than going on long hikes and taking classes remotely at Penn State for my doctoral degree in ecology and anthropology. One of the classes was an agroforestry class with Eric Burkhart. We studied how agriculture and forests benefit people and the environment. Foragers have been harvesting wild mushrooms in what is now Pennsylvania and the rest of the U.S. mid-Atlantic region for generations, but the extent and specifics of the practice in the region had not been formally studied. We conducted a series of surveys in 2022 and 2023 that revealed a wide variety of fungi are foraged in the region ' though morels, chicken of the woods and chanterelles are most common. We also learned that harvesters use the mushrooms...
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