N.S. entrepreneur developing mushroom roots as sustainable, high-protein food product
CBC
Deep within a dark growing chamber in the bowels of a research lab at Acadia University, a lumpy white substance blooms up from an industrial tray.
It looks like meringue, or snow, or spray-foam insulation.
This alien-looking living organism with “a mind of its own” is mycelium — the roots of a mushroom.
Researchers at Acadia have teamed up with an entrepreneur to develop and fine-tune a process they hope will someday use the mycelium to produce a high-protein powder for the commercial food market.
The project is the brainchild of Katie McNeill, who started with just a kernel of an idea a few years ago.
McNeill, who has a background in agriculture, saw that some agricultural food products in the Valley were being wasted — incinerated or dumped in a landfill. She saw their potential.
“I just happened to stumble on some literature that showed that it could lend itself really well to growing a high-protein mushroom,” she says.
She connected with Allison Walker, a biologist at Acadia, and the two teamed up and got to work.
They chose one particular food waste — which they won’t divulge for proprietary reasons — from a food-grade facility in the Valley to grow the mycelium on.
Then, they experimented with different species of mushrooms, as well as temperature and humidity to find the optimal growing conditions.
Walker explains that they first make a liquid broth of mycelium and mix it with the food waste.
She lets the mycelium grow for a couple of days “to get big and juicy and happy” before introducing more food waste and eventually transferring the mycelium to trays.
“Normally if you think of a mushroom in the woods, mycelium is growing down and exploring the soil,” Walker says. “We're trying to kind of minimize that and just make it grow up.”
She stops the growth before the mycelium produces mushrooms, and the whole process from start to harvest takes a week to 10 days.
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