#148 Jeff Chilton – The Power of Mushrooms
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December 22, 2020
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December 27, 2020Meet Jeff Chilton:
It all began in 1973, when Jeff Chilton went to work at Ostrom Mushroom Farms in Olympia Washington.
Jeff quickly worked his way up to Grower and ultimately Production Manager. At that time Ostroms was producing over 2 million pounds of fresh Agaricus mushrooms per year and was at the cutting edge of new technologies, including what were then known as specialty mushrooms. A Japanese scientist on staff, Dr. Takashi Urayama, implemented an R+D program which grew Shiitake, Oyster and Enoki mushrooms. Shiitake production was scaled up and fresh shiitake were introduced to the local market in 1978. This was the first fresh shiitake sold on a large scale in the U.S.
Exposure to these new mushroom species as well as a Fellowship to the Dutch School for Mushroom Growers in 1976 gave Jeff a much broader outlook on the mushroom industry and influenced his future path.
In 1983, after 10 years of commercial mushroom growing experience, Jeff co-authored and published the classic, bestselling book on small-scale mushroom cultivation, The Mushroom Cultivator. That same year he moved his family to British Columbia to start a mushroom spawn laboratory and small speciality mushroom growing facility. By 1989, after much research, it became clear that many of the specialty mushrooms had beneficial properties and this was the wave of the future.
In 1989 Jeff made his first trip to China to attend the International Society for Mushroom Science’s (ISMS) conference in Nanjing and he discovered the depth of mushroom knowledge and production capacity that China offered. The relationships Jeff built over the next 10 years laid the foundation that made Nammex a leader in the new category of health promoting mushrooms. This same year, 1989, Nammex was founded.
ABOUT JEFF
- I was born in Washington state and grew up in Seattle
- In the fall, we get a lot of rain, and the temperature is down which is perfect for mushrooms
- Growing up, I have mushroomed all around me, and hunting for mushroom is like a treasure for me
- I essentially study the world of mushrooms for food and medicine
- My college professor told me that there is a mushroom farm and told me to apply for the job
- I applied for the job and got it and I was there for 10 years
- The key is to be with the people who have that experience and knowledge
- Never eat a wild mushroom unless it has been identified by someone who is an expert
- There’s a lot of mushrooms that are edible, but they don’t taste so good
ABOUT MUSHROOMS
- We do have a number of edible mushrooms that are in the supermarket that are in fact medicinal
- Mushroom does not have seed, and they produce spores
- Those spores just fall on the ground, fall on the wood just by the wind
- When multiple spores fuse together, they form a network called, mycelium which is the actual body that produces the fruit
- We do not normally see mycelium, because it usually on the underground
- With fungi, they are very susceptible to drying, they need a moist environment
- Mushrooms are decomposers, so fungi are converting all that organic matter back into hummus
- Without the fungi, we would be neck-deep in organic matter
- When conditions are right, this mycelium will put up a mushroom
- As long as there is a continuous nutrient for that mycelium to consume, that mushroom will keep coming up
- There are 3 plant parts which are spore, mycelium, and mushroom
- When you buy a supplement you get to question which part of the herb are they using in that supplement
- Because the different plant part will have different amounts of the active compounds that we are really looking for
- So with the mushroom, there are 3 plant parts and what we normally look at in the case of supplements is the mushroom
- The mushroom is where the medicinal compounds are
- One of the things that I really advocate is to put mushrooms into their diet
- When I went to work in the mushroom farm in 1973, classical nutritionist basically said that mushroom has no food value
- And they say that because the mushroom is very low in calories
- Low calorie back in the ’70s was a non-food, food
- Mushrooms are highly nutritious, they are like 20% to 40% percent, but not all mushrooms are the same in terms of their nutritional value
- Mushrooms are mostly carbohydrate, but they do not contain starch
- The carbohydrate in mushrooms are mannitol which is a very slow-acting type of carb, and it is not giving you the burst when you eat sugar or grains
- Mushrooms are also high in fiber which is feeding our microbiome
- Mushrooms are also high in potassium, phosphorus, and B vitamins
- When you cook mushrooms, do it in a hot pan
- The reason why there are slimy is because it is not cooked in a hot pan and all the water come right out of them and they are being cooked in fluid
- When cooking a mushroom, cut them in a quarter of an inch thick, fry them in a hot pan for 10 minutes, and I like to brown the sides of them to seal the moisture and to add a little flavor
- When you fry a mushroom, they get shrink about half there size
- After I left the mushroom farm back in the ’80s, I realized, I did not want to be in the business of growing fresh mushroom
- A mushroom farm never sleeps, they are harvesting mushrooms every single day of the year because on a bigger farm, they a cropping cycle, and those crops have to be harvested or the mushroom will mature too much
- Every single mushroom you have ever eaten is picked by hand
- Knowing about medicinal mushrooms, I decided to go into business
- The beauty of that is, I do not have to sell fresh that needs to be on the market, but I can sell powder that can sit on the shelf until I sell it
- I started my company, Nammex in 1989
- In 1989, I made my very first trip to China and I went to a mushroom conference and for the next 10 years, I was back and forth to China visiting farms, research institute, conferences or processors
- Mushrooms in their cell wall have a compound called beta-glucan
- Mushroom cell walls are made of 50% beta-glucan
- One of the things that I really like is, it lands the concept of food as medicine
- Eating mushrooms is really important to get into your diet
- I have a book that talks about 270 different mushrooms with helpful benefits, not just on dietary benefits but also medicinal
- In the ’90s, I wrote books and articles to educate
- It took a full 5-10 years during the 1990s to actually convince companies or anybody in the healing traditions that in fact mushrooms are an important part of a healing program
- I still love to get out and educate people about mushrooms
- What my company makes is actually mushroom extracts
- It’s one thing to eat mushroom as food which I recommend, but if you want to take a step further, maybe you’ll like to supplement
- One of the books I wrote was in 1983 called, The Mushroom Cultivator
- If anybody wants to grow mushroom, they can just get it out there
- I got a great white paper on my website called, Redefining Medicinal Mushrooms
WHERE CAN PEOPLE FIND YOU
- Website: nammex.com
realmushrooms.com
