On a hazy August afternoon, a troupe of excited twentysomethings fanned out into the muggy shade of oaks and hemlocks in the woods of central Pennsylvania. Speaking sparingly, eyes fixed to the ground, they traced the mossy, wooded flank of a tributary to the Susquehanna River.��

As I followed along on my first-ever Cordyceps hunt, it was presumptuous to hope to be the first to spot the rare fungus we sought. Yet less than 15��minutes into our foray, a slender orange mushroom in a mossy ditch caught my eye, and I called out to the group leader. William Padilla-Brown didn’t need to get close to see that, unsurprisingly, I had struck upon fungal fool’s gold: a . “The colors look very similar, especially this time of year,” he said graciously. After a moment’s more attention, even I could tell it looked nothing like the we sought; for self-esteem’s sake, I squinted at the mushroom in hopes of seeing more of a resemblance, but to no avail.��

“You really have to get in here and tune in,” he said. The 25-year-old mycologist then disappeared between the trees to regroup with his companions. Not two minutes had passed before a triumphant shout reverberated from down the creek. “Yooo! Cordyceeeps! Woohoo!” Scrambling over logs and ditches, I discovered the group crouched in a huddle along an embankment beside the creek. Edging in, it took nearly a minute before I could see the fungus at the center of all the fuss, a tiny ocher apostrophe hovering above the wet underbrush. No larger than a baby’s pinkie, it marked the troop’s first big find of the day. The collective energy was suddenly charged and borderline ecstatic.��

Cordyceps (or cordies��or cheetos,��to those in the know) are subjects of intense passion��for a growing number of young mycophiles across North America. They’re at the center of a growing��community of independent, tinkering cultivators��and a boutique ��economy in which Padilla-Brown and his cohort represent the DIY cutting edge.��

Padilla-Brown is a bona fide mycological influencer, his profile steadily growing beyond the realm of fungi. He has tens of thousands of followers ��and has been��profiled in a growing list of and documentaries. He’s an author as well, with two well-received ��on the cultivation of C. militaris, including the first on the subject written in English, and a seemingly endless list of ancillary projects that orbit the central goal of demonstrating and encouraging circular, local, sustainable models for small-scale agriculture. On top of that, he is also a father��and maintains a parallel career as a hip-hop artist��under the moniker .

Despite these accomplishments, Padilla-Brown has no formal education in mycology, ecology, economics, politics, nor any other field one might expect given the scope of his work. He describes himself as a “graduate of Google Scholar.” The son of parents in the U.S.��Army and the Department of Agriculture’s��Foreign Agricultural Service, at various points in his childhood Padilla-Brown found himself living in London, Mexico City, and Taipei, before ultimately settling in Pennsylvania.

Moving from state to state, country to country, school to school, resulted in a fragmented education. Ultimately, after he dropped out of high school at age 16, he spent the next two years “focused inward,” meditating, traveling, spending time in nature, and experimenting with mind-altering substances.

“I’d be going outside and walking a lot, and getting visuals and things, but I realized a lot of the visuals were just the understanding of natural patterns,” he said. “Once I understood it, I would go to some other level. And I was��like, wow, I can really understand the way nature works, maybe I should be working with nature.”

Having grown up largely in urban environments, seeing trees as just “green blurs alongside the highway,” Padilla-Brown first undertook the study of permaculture. A preternatural autodidacticism helped him advance his skills and knowledge in spite of a disjointed educational experience.

At age 18, Padilla-Brown began growing mushrooms. Two years after that, and shortly after the birth of his son, Leo, he committed to making a living in pursuit of mycology and his nascent concepts of social permaculture. “I was��like, I can’t keep working as a server. I couldn’t get good jobs, because I was a high school dropout. I had [Leo] when I was 20, and I was��like, I’m not going to let myself fall into this stereotypical ‘young Black male high school dropout with a kid that can’t get a good job.’ So I was��like, screw it. I quit my job the year he was born, and I was��like, I’m going all in.”��

The gambit paid off, as Padilla-Brown finds himself in demand as a speaker and the increasingly familiar face of young, diverse eco-entrepreneurship. Though he’s wary of tokenism in some spaces where he’s invited to teach or speak, his message since has remained one of, in essence: If I can do this, anyone can, and more people should.

Cordyceps are entomopathogenic, meaning they kill insects. But they don’t just kill them. One of the scenarios most often recounted plays out like a scene from The Body Snatchers. It starts when the spores of a certain species of Cordyceps take root in the carapace of an ant—different species target different insects. Hyphae then thread throughout the insect’s tiny body, eventually seizing control of its nervous system. The ant becomes, in effect, a living zombie, unwittingly stumbling up a nearby branch, inevitably one that sits directly over the path most used by its hive mates. There, its final, irresistible impulse is to latch its jaws upon the twig, dying as the mycelium finally consumes all the insect’s innards. After that comes the unsettling coda; out of the back of the ant’s tiny neck slithers a slender ,��its surface bristling and primed to rain spores down upon the next group of unfortunate ants below.��

There are more than 400 species of Cordyceps, each associated with a specific insect: spiders, grasshoppers, wasps, to name a few. In Tibet, Ophiocordyceps sinensis and its host moth larvae are methodically plucked from the foothills of the Himalayas. Locally known as yarza gunbu, or “winter worm, summer grass,” it is regarded as a potent aphrodisiac, often fetching a higher price than gold, always with the insect still attached.

In North America, alongside mushrooms like lion’s mane, maitake, turkey tail,��and Chaga, Cordyceps has emerged at the center of a fast-growing domestic market for medicinal fungi, representing an industry that is $50 billion by 2025.

The medicinal benefits of Cordyceps are largely credited to a special compound it produces, called . The compound has been associated with anticancer, anti-fatigue, anti-inflammatory, immune, and sexual-function-boosting properties, among other benefits, elevating it to the realm of fungal superfood, complete with the full range of branding and value-added products that term implies. It’s now easy to find Cordyceps coffee, butter, powder for adding to your smoothies, and as an ingredient in tinctures and extracts. Ongoing research into medicinal mushrooms is promising, but as with most traditional and trendy medicines, not yet conclusive as far as the science is concerned.

Cordyceps are notoriously tough to grow��and are��mostly cultivated by large-scale facilities in China or other parts of Asia, which understandably do not go to great effort to share their methods with American growers. Materials documenting how to grow the recalcitrant orange fungus were essentially nonexistent in the English language until Padilla-Brown published his first cultivation guide in 2017. Since then, a fast-growing community of small-scale cultivators and genetic tinkerers has sprung up around the country and the world. Within a month of its publication, he said, people in more than 20��countries had bought the book; when we spoke, he’d sold almost 5,000 copies. Padilla-Brown also appears to be the first in the country ever to grow the mushrooms commercially; meanwhile, others have launched their own businesses around cultivating the fungus, such as , currently the largest producer of C. militaris in the country. Before these developments, domestically grown, whole Cordyceps fruiting bodies were nearly impossible to find on the market, driving their import price as high as $120 per dry ounce. Part of the goal in developing accessible cultivation methods was to get these prices down so that a domestic market could emerge.

Our hike in the Pennsylvania woods represented what was called a pheno hunt.��Each new specimen uncovered in the woods would be brought straight into a basement lab, where the Cordyceps obsessives would toil to tease out and propagate the most desirable traits. Some look for strange and interesting morphologies, or high yields and fast grow times; ideally, they would also produce the most cordycepin, but identifying��specific compounds required sophisticated biochemical analysis that few, if any, could perform or afford.��

Part of the hope in promoting ethically, sustainably sourced mushrooms is that they’ll be worth the extra price to conscious consumers. The cannabis industry sets an example. High-quality extracts such as oils, concentrates, hash, shatter, and other refined forms��of marijuana��are familiar to informed cannabis consumers. That same product class is beginning to emerge around Cordyceps and other medicinal mushrooms. The question remains open whether there is as high a ceiling in the market for medicinal fungi as there is for pain relief and recreation represented by CBD and THC.��

As I descended into the basement of Padilla-Brown’s Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, home, a pink glow gave the impression that I was entering a mad scientist’s lair.��That was, in fact, not far from the reality.��

Hidden in the corner behind a zip-up air lock was Padilla-Brown’s lab. Positive air pressure ensured that contaminants escaped, rather than entered, and a stereo made sure that he didn’t lose his mind after a full day of staring into readouts and petri dishes. Multicolor agar plates were stacked in the corner, encrusted white with dried bleach, a measure taken against soil mites that often hitchhike on Cordyceps. “Don’t touch that,” he warned as he inoculated tubs of substrate, noticing my curiosity, “It’ll make your finger feel weird.”��

In a small refrigerator in the corner, stacks of bleach-free plates contained the strains he’d been cloning; many were the result of previous pheno hunts. After finding the mushrooms, he’d grown them out in the agar, and with a scalpel and sterilizer had propagated the resulting mycelia in dozens of glass jars stacked on racks outside the air lock.��

“When you deal with all these clones, probably like 20��to 50��percent if you’re lucky are going to produce mushrooms,” he said. “A lot of them won’t do anything. So the ones that produce mushrooms, I then took spores from those, and then I did breeding, which took a long time, and I had to figure out the whole DNA thing. I taught myself molecular biology in like two and a half months. I’d seen people do it a couple times, but I just watched a bunch of YouTube videos.”��

A flow hood was set up next to a microscope. Beside that was a small thermocycler, used to prepare samples for genetic sequencing. Padilla-Brown conducted his own analyses to determine mating types. After preparing samples from a newly cloned specimen, he could visually assess their mating types using relatively simple gel electrophoresis—the process that separates genetic samples by length into easily read parallel rows, or bands—usually an intermediate step taken to verify sample quality before sequencing. The whole process took about two hours.��

I had to take a mental step back and appreciate the scene. Here was someone without any formal scientific education, innovating genetic sequencing and cultivation techniques in his basement in ways that not only produced interesting biological results��but also served as the basis of several small but .��

Exiting the air lock, we walked over to the source of the pink light. Wire warehouse racks upheld corridors of glass jars, the twisting orange fingers of Cordyceps growing atop cakes of myceliated rice. Held up by bungee cord and a stepladder, banks of LED lights provided the light wavelengths determined to maximize growth: red, pink, and blue, the latter of which encouraged the mushrooms to pin. Seeing all this, I had to ask:��Why Cordyceps? “Why me?” Padilla-Brown retorted. “I didn’t choose this.”��

For the time being, he was focused more on writing the next cultivation book than producing mushrooms at any kind of economic scale. The mushrooms he was growing would be put to use by Cassandra Posey, his partner in both senses of the word.��

Upstairs, we sat down for dinner, where Posey joined us to explain their business concepts��and goals for the future. Posey, whose company made use of the Cordyceps grown in the basement as the basis of its line of tinctures, ghee, coffee, honey, and other fungi-infused products, had in turn helped improve the branding of Padilla-Brown’s company, . Posey was hustling from coast to coast to get people interested in the “forest to table” health products produced by her, Padilla-Brown, and the growing community of eco-entrepreneurs in which they were becoming leaders.��

“Will thinks very here and now, which is so great—I wish I could be more present in the moment,” she said as we set down our forks. “But my parents heavily instilled a lot of the big-picture, five-year-plan kind of thing into me. I grew up watching my dad run a company, and all that is like my playground.”��

“I’m not a business person at all,” added Padilla-Brown, pulling out a Nintendo Switch as our energy wound down with the evening. “I don’t like doing business, I like doing whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it, which is beneficial for the students that I teach.”��

The couple, I realized, were a living example of brand synergy, finding a productive intersection between Posey’s business acumen and Padilla-Brown’s multifarious projects and experiments. They told me of a story from the time just before they’d started dating. Padilla-Brown had managed to with Cordyceps mycelium, a difficult trick given its temperamental nature. On a visit to New York, he presented them to Posey as a gift. “That’s when I fell in love with him,” she said, half jokingly. “He was��like, ‘I brought you a present,’ and then he hands me these freaking beans, and I’m just��like, I’m not going to date this guy, we’re just going to be friends.”

It was late by the time dinner ended, so I slept on the living-room couch. The scope and ambition of Posey and Padilla-Brown’s plans suddenly seemed incongruous with the scale of the place in which they were being hatched. But outside awaited a world of fungal tinkerers eager for new methods and ideas to propagate.��

The following excerpt is from Doug Bierend’s new book (Chelsea Green Publishing, March 2021) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

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In December 1996, John Sauve, then-executive director of the Wild Blueberry Association of North America (), received an unexpected fax. It contained an article from the latest issue of AgResearch titled: “.”

At first, Sauve wasn’t sure what to make of the article. Like most people at the time, he had no real idea what antioxidants were: they were only just starting to enter the public consciousness, thanks to the emergence of mutually supportive research and marketing. Sauve definitely didn’t know they would soon become fundamental to the public perception of wild blueberries, which are smaller, more flavorful, and less common than the cultivated highbush blueberry familiar to most shoppers.��

Back then, blueberries weren’t seen by many consumers as an especially healthy fruit. They were just something you put in a pie. You found them in the supermarket next to the whipped cream. In 1994, Sauve gave a presentation on the five points of appeal he’d identified for wild blueberries—none of them were related to nutrition. “We were still trying to sell blueberries because they taste good inside of muffins, and we were doing OK with that,” he says in a droll Maine accent. “Health wasn’t even on the radar screen.”��

Poring over the AgResearch article, Sauve learned about a new assay test being used at Tufts University called ORAC (short for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity), which��ranked��blueberries number one��in terms of antioxidant activity. By this point, antioxidant compounds were known to be a factor in reducing oxidative stress, the potentially harmful overaccumulation of negatively charged atoms called . While blueberries’ place at the top of the results wasn’t clearly stated in the article, Sauve connected the dots. “I said, ‘Hey, we came out first!’” he recalls. “I had no idea what we had won, but it sounded good.”

The next day, Sauve was on the phone with Ronald Prior, who led the research at Tufts. Soon, he was meeting with Prior in Boston, along with neuroscientists Barbara Shukitt-Hale and the late��James Joseph, lead author of the 2003 book . It became clear they had a story to tell: that blueberries carried exceptional amounts of this health-helping thing called . There was no guarantee that the message would resonate, but WBANA bet on it anyway. “We threw our hat into the ring with health,” Sauve says, “and invested most of our money in that area.”

Savvy promotion of the fruit was about to help��usher in an era of health food obsession that we’re still living in today. No longer mere tasty treat��or part of a balanced diet, blueberries would become known as cancer combatants, inflammation interceptors, defenders of cognitive function—each berry a nutritional Navy SEAL.��

A superfood was born.

For anyone who grew up around the Down East area of Maine, wild blueberries evoke a cherished landscape and way of life. The roughly 38,000 acres of lowbush wild blueberry fields form ��that stretch to the horizon. With��about 500 farms devoted to wild blueberries,��they’re the leading fruit crop in the state. “People have long memories here of raking when they were kids and earning money for their school clothes,” says Nancy McBrady, former executive director of the Maine Wild Blueberry Commission (). “It’s very much a part of Maine’s heritage.” These berries thrive almost exclusively in the rough, acidic glacial till along the coasts of Maine, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec. Their shallow, resilient rhizome roots can survive fires��and, unencumbered by weeds, trees, and other competitors, will slowly fill out over years or decades. Wild blueberries aren’t really planted—they’re unleashed and managed.��

While wild blueberry acreage and farm count has shrunk in recent decades, improved crop management has steadily increased the total pounds of berries produced and sold. “It has gone up astronomically as far as the production of fruit, both for wild and cultivated,” says David Yarborough, a blueberry specialist at the University of Maine (and the man who sent Sauve the AgResearch article). “We’re producing more blueberries than we’re eating, but we just have to get more people to eat more wild blueberries, or blueberries in total.”

In 1971, the quasi–state agency WBC��was formed, funded via a self-imposed tax on blueberry farmers with ��to “conserve and promote the prosperity and welfare” of Maine’s wild blueberry industry. While WBC mainly handles crop research, a large part of its budget is funneled to WBANA, which covers marketing and advertising for both Canadian and U.S. wild blueberries—and funding for health research that may support their marketing and advertising. “Promotion has very much been a springboard for the research,” McBrady says.

While WBANA was keen to leverage the Tufts researchers’ antioxidant findings in 1997 to the specific benefit of wild blueberries, the organization��eventually agreed on a promotional health narrative that could stimulate demand for all blueberries. It committed most of its budget to the project��and decided that the scientists themselves would carry the story. “Very quickly, I began to look across the country—and in other countries—for researchers that were involved in blueberries��and found a number of them,” Sauve��says. These researchers came from a range of fields, including neuroscience, cardiology, gerontology, and oncology. Conveniently, their work could speak to the health potential of blueberries, lending critical credibility to the nutrition-focused marketing push. While similar association groups exist for other fruits and now market on the same health research–related grounds, wild blueberries were leaders in making this connection in the public’s mind.��

In August 1998, these blueberry-interested researchers, together with representatives from WBC, WBANA, and Maine’s larger blueberry growers and processors, gathered��for the inaugural Wild Blueberry Research Summit. Eventually dubbed the ��after the picturesque town in Maine where they��meet, it’s an influential club—Steven Pratt, MD, co-author of the hit 2003 book , which is credited with mainstreaming the term,��attended��one of the group’s earliest meetings. Maybe you’ve caught one of the other members��,��singing the praises of cancer-fighting��blueberries.

But while WBC is focused on Maine wild blueberries and WBANA works to support berries from Canada and the United States, the first taste of marketing success—perhaps surprisingly—came from Japan.

In 1997, Sauve’s advertising partners in��Japan��connected him with a local eye doctor who was offering powdered blueberries to his patients. This��partnership helped lend practical credibility to WBANA’s marketing: armed with a recently published ��on blueberries conducted by nutrition specialist Wilhelmina Kalt, the group��made the rounds at industry trade shows in Japan and interacted with the press to drive a health message focused on the fruit’s potential vision-related benefits.��The data suggests that this��approach worked. ��some 1.3 million pounds of frozen blueberries moved from the United States��to Japan in 1995; in 2000, totals reached��11.3 million. Fresh berries sold to Japan in the same time frame jumped from approximately 50,000 pounds to 3.1 million.����

Domestic success was close behind. In July 1998, WBANA and its��advertising partners ran a full-page ad in a special edition of Health��with a colorful chart and simple language trumpeting blueberries as number one in antioxidants among fruits and vegetables. In 1999, Prevention��published a multipage spread on the subject��with the headline��“The Miracle Berry.”��Sauve also says the popularity of smoothies starting in the 1990s was a real game changer—the fact that smoothies are��so often associated with blueberries is largely the result of cross-promotional marketing efforts focusing partly on the antioxidant story.��

It’s tough to pin an entire industry’s trajectory to one set of marketing strategies, but there’s no denying the growth. In 1998, Maine alone produced about 63 million pounds of wild blueberries; in 2000, that number nearly doubled to 110 million. And, according to the U.S. Highbush Blueberry Council, which used numbers from��USDA’s Economic Research Service, U.S. per capita consumption of the fruit����599 percent between 1999 to 2014.

Still, all of this was accomplished without much messaging from anyone��as to what antioxidants actually do.��

Wild blueberries have a lot going for them, in terms of branding. They’re a glorious shade of blue, they come with a great set of stories, they’re full of enough complex molecules to stain your fingers when you squeeze them. But berry crop sales are a competitive scene, and the market for antioxidant-rich foods has grown crowded. It might be said that, to some extent, wild blueberries are now suffering from their own success—and demanding new marketing tactics. “You look around, and lots of foods talk about antioxidants,” says McBrady, executive director of WBC. “I don’t think it’s necessarily the most special thing right now.”

The goal for food advocacy groups like WBANA is to elevate their product, and nowadays��it seems any food that’s high in antioxidant activity wants to label itself a superfood, even if the definition of that term is unclear. “Superfood is a marketing term. It has no nutritional meaning,” says author and NYU professor Marion Nestle. In her latest book, ,��she dives into the history and strategy behind nutrition marketing��and the broader nutritional picture that it often overlooks. “The key to eating healthfully is to eat a wide variety of these foods so their nutrient contents complement each other,” she says.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to the research backing blueberries’ health claims—indeed,��there’s a wealth of compelling evidence.��In work led by Shukitt-Hale, one of the Tufts researchers Sauve first met, for example,��rats showed improved ��and ��after a steady diet of the fruit. Bits of the pigmented compounds found in blueberries were even ,��suggesting the berry’s��ability to cross the blood-brain barrier and access areas relevant to learning and memory.��More recent tests involving human subjects suggest that the compounds can help ��and reduce degradations in����in older adults. Seeking to set wild blueberries apart from cultivated blueberries, researchers are looking into the specific health implications of the former’s extra density of phytochemicals, defensive compounds credited for their resilience to harsh climates. There is ��over whether the difference is meaningful.

But much of the ballyhooed benefits of antioxidant-rich foods��in general are��tough to pin down. Research into the potential merits of antioxidants such as vitamin C, vitamin E, and beta-carotene seem ��to the findings of berry-funded research. There is even research to suggest that certain antioxidant activity can ��one’s health. Eventually, use of the assay ORAC to upsell antioxidants became so widespread��that in 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ��results from the test��“due to mounting evidence that the values indicating antioxidant capacity have no relevance” to definite effects on human health. (For what it’s worth, Sauve thinks the USDA was reacting to misinterpretations first put forward by unscrupulous raisin salesmen.)��

For��its��part, WBANA and its��marketing partners are evolving strategies by shifting focus to anthocyanins—the fruit’s complex pigmented compounds—and their anti-inflammatory potential. Promoting flavor,��which was cast��aside in the ’90s to focus on the health story, is also coming back in style for wild blueberries as “real,” “raw,” and��“wild” foods gain market traction. WBANA’s new target is the fast-growing “”��consumer category, a much sought-after demographic first described by sociologist Paul Ray and psychologist Sherry Anderson. These consumers��don’t just prefer healthier food—they also seek food that is high-quality, minimally processed, and environmentally sustainable. That means appealing to broader wellness sensibilities, as well as certain benefits suggested by research.

But perhaps consumers should just focus on��the value of eating more whole fruits and vegetables in general. As Shukitt-Hale will attest, the case for wild blueberries is not as cut-and-dried��as saying that antioxidants are good for you. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” she says. “There’s something about the synergy of that whole food and the compounds in it. So, when people say, ‘What is the active ingredient,’ I hate that question, because I don’t think there is an ‘active ingredient.’”��

If you’re looking for antioxidants, after all, you can��find them in . “The nutrient claims for blueberries are not specious; they are just overhyped,” Nestle says. “Blueberries are nutritious and delicious. What blueberry trade associations are doing is simply marketing.”

Ultimately, the reason for eating blueberries—or any fruit or vegetable—probably shouldn’t require a scientist’s explanation. “It never occurred to me to think about the phytochemical composition,” says Nestle, who grows her own cultivated blueberries at home. “I just love the way they taste.”

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