Paris mushroom growers struggle to preserve heritage

Two centuries ago, French farmers revolutionised mushroom production by moving into the maze of limestone quarries underneath Paris, but today only a handful still cultivate a heritage at risk of fading away for good.

The bitter irony is that demand for traditionally grown white button mushrooms, and their more flavourful brown-capped cousins, is as high as ever.

“It’s not a question of finding clients, I sell everything I can produce,” said Shoua-moua Vang at Les Alouettes in Carrieres-sur-Seine, a short drive from the bustling La Defence business district west of the capital. Vang runs the largest underground mushroom cave in the Paris region, spread across one and a half hectares (3.7 acres) of tunnels in a hill overlooking the Seine river.

He counts Michelin-starred chefs as well as supermarket chains and local markets among his customers, even though he deems his mushrooms “expensive” at 3.20 euros a kilo wholesale ($1.65 a pound). But dank trays loaded with hundreds of kilogrammes of fungi were going to waste during a recent visit, because Vang lacked enough hands to pick them all.

Just five of his 11 workers were on the job after the others called in sick -- and Vang was doubtful that all of them would actually return.

“People these days don’t want to work all day in the dark like vampires,” he said, estimating that this day’s production would top out at 1.5 tonnes instead of his usual 2.5 or even three tonnes.

He is one of just five traditional producers of what the French call “champignons de Paris” located around the capital, along with an even smaller number in abandoned quarries north of the capital.

That’s down from around 250 in the late 19th century, when farmers flocked to a “royal” mushroom variety that the Sun King, Louis XIV, had made popular by having it grown at Versailles.