Faded Dreams of Riches Drive Pursuit of a Celebrated Fungus
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/us/faded-dreams-of-riches-drive-pursuit-of-a-celebrated-fungus.html
CHEMULT, Ore. ... Some commercial hubs obsess over the price of stock shares, or real estate, or in centuries past, tulip bulbs. This dot of a town in south central Oregon, population 135, briefly flowers each fall into a global capital of the wild mushroom trade, with all eyes fixed on a commodity that few Americans have tasted, or perhaps even heard of: the matsutake.
And at $5 a pound for the best-grade raw matsutakes straight from the woods, paid on a recent evening to pickers at buying tents here like the Souvannasays’, the market has just about crashed into the dirt. ......
In truth, there was probably only one direction, in the long run, that matsutake prices could go. In the fevered market of the early to mid-1990s, when fortunes were made in these sandy volcanic soils near Crater Lake National Park, the price paid in the field to foragers reached $600 a pound. A basket’s worth, if you were lucky enough to collect one and sell it at peak, could buy a car.
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