Shortly before deciding to take the leap into commercial gourmet mushroom cultivation, I stumbled across a video of a young Hamilton Morris reporting on Magic Truffles in Amsterdam for Vice News. In this video Hamilton visits a farm that had to quickly pivot away from fruit body production and into sclerotia forming p. tampanensis cultivation sometime around 2008 due to the prohibition of magic mushrooms by the Dutch government. Years before the ban on the actual fruitbodies, my childhood friend Ken and I entered the Netherlands as naive American stoners and exited through a one way portal into another dimension. Life, for me, was never the same.
Hamilton has written, reported on and recorded an endless amount of fascinating conversations with chemists, anthropologists, mycologists, historians, ethnobotanist and psychonauts from around the world. He has brought out some of the most fringe characters of the psychedelic age and has given hope through his films, series, podcasts and publications to an endless group of us living similar lifestyles. Of the many things he has done and continues to do, Hamilton never ceases to amaze his supporters, a group of devout humans tuning in, forever appreciative of his drive and efforts to report on the stuff we simply cannot get enough of.
This episode, as mentioned in the intro, is a sort of attempt to bridge a gap in my own work. The hope is to combine and interweave the cast of cultivators on either side of a severely stratified industry. As @mushroommundo pointed out to me, its the mainstream vs. the marginalized that is keeping the boxers in their corners. We have a lot to learn from one another and if you don't believe that, I encourage you to look a little harder at the folks just over the river. Collaborative efforts are in our future MycoWizards of the world, so keep an open mind and keep a sane state of stoke to feed the fire and stay driven!
- @shroomodoom
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