James Mann

Growing up in Appalachia, I always felt at home in the forest. Although I didn’t t realize it at the time, I would have to move away from it to really appreciate it. For almost 10 years I thought I wanted to be a chef, and while cooking will always be a big part of my life, there was always something missing. While a chef, I rediscovered my woodland roots by going out to the woods to find edible mushrooms to bring to the restaurants for special dishes, and that lit the fire in my heart to get back out into the forest and pick up where my childhood left off. By 2022, I was working on a mushroom farm and going out into the woods any chance I could get, learning more and more every day about how the mushrooms work with the trees, how the trees work with the plants. I started to understand how this seemingly random, and chaotic ecosystem works.

After many years of going into nature and learning about its inter-workings, I realized that not many people knew what was going on out in the hardwood forests—treating nature as a museum that cannot be explored, touched, smelled or tasted. My goal is to change peoples’ minds and try to take back our role in the environment through learning, stewardship and understanding.