When you grow up on a macrobiotic diet and cut your teeth making chocolate with your Mother, is it any wonder that Radek’s chocolate has its well earned reputation for prizing independence and making chocolate with ingredients that are good for you in a sustainable manner? Joe McDonnell met his partner Radek in a vegan restaurant and they produce gorgeous chocolate of the type that the big food brands just don’t. Their value set was clear at our first talk of the new year.
Our other guest has an exotic backstory. Tom Baxter of The Bristol Fungarium has at turns been an investment banker, climate activist, forest school founder and organic farmer. And all via Siberia. He found his way to mushrooms as they were a crop he could grow and sell all year round rather than seasonal produce. The Bristol Fungarium is based on his farm, they cultivate and sell medicinal mushrooms and are in the vanguard of the exploding mainstream interest in all things fungi.
Mushrooms have been with us for 1.3 billion years, the Chinese have been across their medicinal value for the last 2000 of those and Tom gave us real detail on the relatively few that we know about. Of those, we only really understand 25 of the 200 elements they each have and Tom talked us through their construct. There are 150,000 mushrooms that are globally recognised but there are likely to be 1.5 million in total out there on earth. Amateur foragers, your time has come.
Joe told us about his process; the nib and husk separation, the painstaking production and also the love too - he says that farmers are still being stuffed. The bliss molecule is a real thing, akin to a cannabinoid in chocolate, and he explained the entourage effect, where the compounds work together to make us feel great. It’s a steady high too and Radek’s has only coconut sugar, so no spikes, crashes or headaches.
Tom fielded the many questions concerning specific health benefits of mushrooms; cancer, debilitating pain, hormonal balance and joint pain amongst many. Reishi mushrooms work across the body’s differing systems and he cited a 50 year Japanese study that found markedly better outcomes for those that ate mushrooms every day compared to those that ate them twice a week.
Yoga practitioner Miranda Shaw led the room in a mindful tasting of Radek’s chocolate made with Fungarium’s Lions Mane mushroom. We closed our eyes and fell silent as Miranda asked us to recognise and enjoy the detail and engage our senses. For those of us whose impulse is to stuff chocolate down with speed, at high volume, the gentle manner in which we acclimatised and then enjoyed the chocolate was a revelation. We were encouraged to take this mindset into our daily lives and feel the joy of the small but beautiful: the morning dew, birdsong, the stars and the breeze.
The toolboxes were precise. For Joe it’s all about ingredients - check the wrapper for details and the supply chain and process. As a rule, anything north of 70% cacao and you’re in. He has a QR code on his website that will tell you what to look for.
For Tom it was all about quantity - eat more mushrooms and take more tinctures. Only good can come from this.
Links/resources:
As always, we spun a themed playlist on the night, it featured:
Emma - Hot Chocolate
Mushroom - Johnny Osbourne
Sweet Like Chocolate - Shanks and Bigfoot
Baby Blue - The Chocolate Watchband
(Don’t Fear) The Reaper - Blue Oyster Cult
Fungi - Eek-A-Mouse
Mushroom - Can
Microdosing - African Head Charge
Dark Side of the Mushroom - The Chocolate Watchband
I Don’t Like You - The Sacred Mushroom
Marathon - Santana
Champignons - Salut C’est Cool
Mars Needs Guitars - Hoodoo Gurus
Aravinda - Magic Mushroom Band
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