A Visit To The National Mushroom Development Institute

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Once a week my driver would hand me a big plastic see-through container crammed to the brim with mushrooms. Needless to say I had to learn a lot of new recipes besides pasta sauce. One day I asked him why he kept buying me mushrooms. He told me that he wasn’t buying them, that he grew them and had plenty to share. When I asked how he learned to do that, he said he went to mushroom school. I thought, a mushroom school in Dhaka? Then he asked me if I’d like to go. Of course! I said.

BY Jeffrey Gantner

The mushroom school is actually the National Mushroom Development Institute, part of the Ministry of Agriculture. It’s a lab, farm, classroom and retailer, all in one location in Savar. The Institute is wedged between tea stalls and you’ve to keep your eyes peeled for the entrance, especially if you don’t read Bengali. Look for the cartoon mushroom sign painted in national colours.
The Institute offers both formal and informal classes. The latter are distinguished by their whirlwind curriculum. Basics of mushroom cultivation are taught in a few hours each day to a handful of students, of which I was hoping to be one.
I removed my shoes (mushrooms hate dust) and approached the reception desk. The clerk was surprised to see me, a foreigner, standing there. She sent me down the hall to the director, a busy, pleasant man with a firm handshake. He seemed to be juggling a hundred responsibilities. When I walked into his office he hung up the phone and turned his attention to me, whether out of wonder or interest I couldn’t tell. Still, he offered a soft chair and a cup of fresh tea. Some locals were there, signing up for the informal class. All of them were trying hard not to stare at me but failing. They were here to learn how to grow mushrooms for profit. I, on the other hand, had come because I was curious.
I was told that classes are taught, naturally, in Bengali only. The director paused and looked at me as if to gauge my understanding of Bengali. I have very little knowledge of Bengali, certainly not enough to learn anything by. You can imagine the potential for catastrophe in the classroom. I’d have to settle for a guided tour.
Ms Sultana, my de facto guide, leads me outside to the adjacent one- room building. Light seeps in through the open doorway. A handful of people are seated on the ground, working. Ms Sultana explains that they’re preparing the substrate, the growing medium for the mushrooms.
A mammoth mixer is blending rice husks and saw dust in the proper ratio. Workers pack a measured amount of the mixture in bread loaf-sized plastic bags. Then they tie a spout into the bag and cap it with a wad of cotton to filter the air. (Rice straw, cheap and plentiful in Bangladesh, is also used as substrate after it’s been pasteurized. There is a pasteurization chamber on site.)
Next, the bags are placed into an autoclave, a sterilizer that resembles a pizza oven. High-pressure steam kills any contaminants. Then the sterile bags are inoculated. Inoculation is the process of ‘seeding’ the bags with mushroom spore. Under favourable conditions – temperature, humidity, lighting – fuzzy threadlike mycelium develops inside the bags. Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus that produces, among other structures, mushrooms.
What if you want to grow mushrooms but can’t afford to buy a fancy sterilizer? Luckily, the Institute builds an inexpensive, compact version of its autoclave. This affordable variant, designed by the director, is assembled from ordinary sheet metal. Add a small boiler, a short length of hose, a gas flame to boil the water and, while perhaps not as elegant, presto! This lower-tech autoclave does the same thing as its big brother using the same principles.
In the next building we put on clean flip flops and tiptoe over wet floors to a sanitized laboratory. A young man in a lab coat (what else) is inoculating bags of substrate. In a habitual rhythm he scrapes a spoonful from a ‘mother’ and transfers it into virgin bags fresh from the autoclave. These bags are then moved into a climate controlled room. They’ll be misted with water and sit for a month or more while the mycelium percolates.
Nearly 200 types of mushrooms grow in Bangladesh. But I’ll only see a fraction of these inside the growing rooms, a clutch of low concrete buildings. Doors and windows are kept open to encourage airflow. Direct sunlight cannot penetrate the rooms. Soon-to-be flowering bags are stacked high on steel shelves, sharing space with oyster mush

rooms in varying stages of development. Oyster mushrooms resemble lily pads or warped umbrellas the colour of snow and cotton candy. They have a slightly fishy aroma and flavour and make an agreeable meat substitute.
Ms Sultana introduces me to one of the men in charge of the growing rooms. He grabs a bag chalky white with mature mycelium and, with the fluid gesticulations of a hand model, makes two semi-circular cuts in the plastic with a razor blade. These are the openings through which the mushrooms will sprout and flower. At this stage the bags must be continually misted with fresh water lest they dry out.
The man shows me to another building where woody medicinal mushrooms called reishi are growing. Reishi mushrooms are hard to the touch, like a wooden spoon, and look like something out of Star Wars. Another much cooler, darker room is stacked to the rafters with prized Japanese shiitake. I ask where they grow the magic ones but no one gets the joke.
My tour ends inside a small shop stocked with products from HWL, a local herbalist. The shopkeeper piles onto the table things that I never knew could be made from mushroom extract (personal care products, teas, pills) but no fresh mushrooms. Stocks have become erratic as the temperature has soared: Turns out mushrooms hate hot weather as much as they hate dust.
So I thank Ms Sultana for the tour, buy two bags of dried oysters and call it a day. The shopkeeper asks if I’d like to try the mushroom powder. When I ask him what it’s for he says it’s for good health and that you add it to your morning eggs. And then he flexes his biceps like the Schwarzenegger of Bangladesh.
I take the powder.
Jeffrey Gantner is a freelance creative & technical writer. He can be reached at jeff@jeffgantnerwriter.com

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