That’s how I got the job at the center in 1998. “I actually majored in forestry studies at university, and one of my professors was an expert in mushrooms. So what made her take a job in Fukushima? I think the word fuku-fuku perfectly captures what makes these mushrooms special and has helped people really fall in love with them.” “We had a public contest to name the Fukushima hon-shimeji in 2018, and ended up calling the brand ‘Fuku-Fuku Shimeji’. I really hope everyone will try them and see for themselves how good they are.” In fact, when we analyzed the umami components of our mushrooms, we found that they contained more glutamic acid and aspartic acid than other mushrooms. “You can really taste the wild flavor, and a consistency that feels as if the fibers are falling apart in your mouth. ![]() “All this time is what allows the rich flavors to slowly build up in Fukushima hon-shimeji mushrooms,” Narumi told us, her quiet smile revealing the pride she takes in the finished product. Of course, the trade-off is that natural cultivation methods are extremely labor-intensive. This commitment to natural cultivation methods means that producers can easily begin growing the mushrooms without owning large greenhouses or other facilities. That’s why it took twenty years to get here.” In other words, we could only learn the results of our trial-and-error efforts once a year. The natural cultivation technique itself was developed at a Fukushima research institute, but because it is a natural method, we can only harvest the mushrooms once a year in fall. “You have to be very careful that other fungi don’t get into the cultivation bed because they will take over and choke out the shimeji. “Mycorrhizal fungi are extremely delicate,” she explained. Narumi told us more about these intense efforts towards practical production. ![]() She is supporting the production of the necessary cultures to grow hon-shimeji as well as pilot cultivation districts. Wakako Narumi is the director of the Mushroom Promotional Center at the Fukushima Prefecture Forest, Forestry, and Greenery Association. They then spent another ten years of trial and error trying to get those cultivation methods to work. It took about ten years for researchers to identify the mushrooms that were well-suited to natural cultivation from the more than seventy wild varieties they collected. Efforts to develop cultivation methods for hon-shimeji mushrooms began about twenty years ago. This makes them an extremely difficult mushroom to cultivate.įukushima Prefecture was the first in Japan to develop a cultivation technique for these hon-shimeji that can be used in natural environments, and has begun pilot cultivation of them as a registered original variety. Unlike shiitake or buna-shimeji (white beech) mushrooms, which get their nutrients from breaking down trees, hon-shimeji, like matsutake mushrooms, are a mycorrhizal fungus that grows in a symbiotic relationship with living tree roots. They’re much more fun, but watch out: they’ll quickly invade your desktop.Hon-shimeji, or brown beech mushrooms, have long been known for combining the aroma of highly-prized matsutake mycorrhizal mushrooms with a shimeji taste, and they are prized for their rarity and flavorful umami notes.
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![]() (Wain worked with great speed, which meant, for example, that after attending a livestock show, he could dash off astonishingly accurate animal portraits from memory.) As he surveys this new work, these jubilant and wholly original images of cat highjinks, Ingram remarks, “How you’ve managed to capture images of such delight, at such a dark time, I do not know.” Toby Jones plays Sir William Ingram, a sympathetic newspaper editor who had long supplied Wain with much-needed work as an illustrator. His gift for invention blossoms radically from there, especially after Emily’s death. He has produced these drawings to delight his wife but also, perhaps, as a kind of medicine for himself, an elixir to keep himself going. (This was at a time when cats were kept largely as mousers but not treated with the same household regard reserved for dogs.) In one scene, as Emily’s illness progresses, we see Louis surrounded by sketch after sketch of Peter. It shows how one particular cat-a tuxedo named Peter, adopted by Louis and Emily-inspired a love for all felines that sparked not just a remarkable career, but a dazzling way of seeing. Yet The Electrical Life of Louis Wain does something more complex than merely cover all the bases. The story, written by Simon Stephenson and Sharpe, covers the fundamental contours of Wain’s life: The sense of duty he felt, after his father’s death, to take care of his mother and five sisters, a responsibility that he bore for most of his life his brief but presumably happy marriage to the governess, Emily Richardson (played, with owlish vivacity, by Claire Foy), who’d been hired to educate his little sisters and his eventual mental-health struggles, which were most certainly not caused by his wife’s untimely death from cancer-though who ever knows what role great sadness plays in our lives? (The film has been released in some theaters and is currently available to watch on Amazon Prime.) And though there are patches that are sad to watch, it is for the most part a delight, a biopic that brings its subject to life in a way that’s both respectful and open-hearted. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, directed by Will Sharpe and starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role, combines fanciful elements with some rather painfully realistic ones to capture the spirit of Wain. When they’re not preoccupied with pawing at us for breakfast. Owing to a combination of family circumstances, bad business acumen and mental illness, that didn’t happen, though Wain’s cats continue to inspire so much joy that it seems he was right about one thing: His models of choice, perhaps not purely electrical but supercharged nonetheless, are mystical purveyors of past and future secrets. At the turn of the 20th century, Wain’s artwork-showing cats playing golf, wreaking havoc at feline boarding schools, dancing around Christmas trees, playing billiards while indulging in a wee bit of whiskey-became so enormously popular that it should have made him rich. And he painted them by the thousands, some rather naturalistic, others anthropomorphized in ways that still managed to capture their essential catness. He believed they were exceptionally attuned to electricity. ![]() But his truest love was for cats, who spoke to him in ways beyond language. English illustrator Louis Wain knew that: Through the course of his long and sometimes troubled life, which stretched from the late half of the 19the century toward the middle of the 20th, he drew and painted all kinds of animals, including posh people’s dogs. When human faces get to be too much, with their expression of needs, disappointments or anxieties that are beyond your scope to fix, there are always animal faces, which never let you down. |
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