In summer 2009, I was walking through the woods in Indiana with my girlfriend and found some chanterelle mushrooms and roasted them on the side of the trail with some beef jerky. A couple days later we were like, “That was kind of fun, let’s go out and see if we can find more mushrooms.” After about a week or two it was like, “All right, I’m tired of eating mushrooms. What do we do with all these goddamn mushrooms?” So I started taking them to farmers’ markets.
Three years ago comedian-on-hiatus Dave Odd sold a bunch of wild mushrooms at a farmer’s market for $20. Now the 36-year-old is a “specialty provider of weird shit” with a partner, a farm, and a warehouse. —Mike Sula
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The first time I had a bag of chanterelles, I walked up to the mushroom guy’s table at the farmers’ market and said, “Hey, would these be something you would be interested in?” He gave me $20 for them. I kept bringing them to this same person, and eventually one of his employees said, “Hey, you should just start talking to restaurants directly.” I started selling them to the restaurants right around the end of August, early September, which is when fall mushroom season kicks in. There’s the hen of the woods mushroom, and there’s puffball mushrooms, and all these big crazy giant mushrooms that you can find 100, 150 pounds of them a day pretty easy.
When I was a comedian, I would actually have to go out in my alley and pick vegetables from the neighbors’ gardens hanging over the fence just to have a meal for the night. I started thinking: I could go out on the street for ten hours, hang up posters, and send out e-mails, mobilize all the comics to tell everyone about a show, and maybe make $250 dollars. Or I could spend a day in the woods picking ramps and make a thousand dollars. What sounds better?
Abra Berens, the farmer →
