Mushroom Sticks

We visited America – Minnesota and Washington – for two wonderful weeks earlier this month. It was great to reconnect with family, friends, and familiar landscape. The trip made me excited to return home next April, but also made me feel that "home" – my life in the USA – is not as far from Thailand as I thought it was.

One question we were asked several times while visiting home was, "Is the food you eat every day just like the food in a Thai restaurant?" The answer is, "Yes and no." Thai restaurants in America primarily serve central Thai food (from the central region of the country). Living in the north of Thailand as we do, a lot of our food is "northern Thai" food. So the logical next question is, "How is northern Thai food different from central Thai food?"

After some reflection, I think I’ve come up with the right answer. In central Thailand, with its miles upon miles of well-irrigated, flat fields, cuisine is based on agricultural foods: farmed vegetables, domesticated animals, etc. Northern Thai food, by contrast, is made from vegetables, leaves, grasses, and animals that grow on their own or are gathered from the forests and mountains: water spinach, mushrooms, bugs and frogs. Although it is now possible in our town to get food from all over the country, 20 years ago that wasn’t the case and most people ate what they could find in their own backyards.

Mushrooms grow mostly during the rainy season, though, so what do you do when you want mushrooms and it hasn’t rained for 4 months? You grow your own on a stick, of course. Here is Yosita, age 12, showing some mushroom sticks at the home of another student. They can be watered to help the fungus grow. The bottle caps, it was explained to me, give an extra boost to the speed of growth as they rust.