My personal relationship to the forest and foraging began at an early age. Growing up in New York state on farmland with a forest and creek behind my childhood home always kept me engaged with the earth. I felt safe in the woods. I remember making mud pies, filling frisbees with soil and water and adding mushrooms, berries and pinecones as toppings. I would pretend to serve them to my mother and siblings. I would pick a mushroom from the yard and my mom would tell me not to touch that, it could be poisonous. She shares a common aversion towards fungi that most people seem to have. Fungi are associated with death and decay and the possible poisoning during human consumption. Society has unfortunately judged them by what they represent, not what they are and how their functions benefit our ecosystems and physical bodies.

My curiosity deepened as I became older and began to learn about the ecological plants and fungi that surround me, I learned to trust the forest, the answers were within it. My knowledge of fungi grew once I moved to the Hudson Valley and lived on my own in the forest. I began collecting books on local mushrooms and studied the ones deemed edible. Today, I go out and forage for reishi, morels, chicken of the woods, hen of the woods, oyster mushrooms, and black trumpets to name some of my favorites. My marvel about mushrooms (the fruiting bodies of fungi) and the mycelium (the hidden vegetative web of fungi found underground) grows deeper each day.