General Meeting and Speaker, October 2022 - Chef Zach Mazi: Erecting the Third Culinary Kingdom

Classically trained in the art of French cuisine, with ventures into the wide array of New American and Pacific Northwest cuisine, Chef Zachary Mazi presents an organic, foraged, local, & imaginative experience in both global cuisine & dining. Igniting others with his contagious zest for life, he creates lasting inspiration with delicious recipes and lectures. He currently in the Pacific Northwest having returned from Chiang Mai, Thailand where he lived and foraged with his fiancé Kimberly for 80 unexpected weeks, planning on relocating to Mexico in March of 2022.  He is the owner-chef-imaginator of The Food Bender, a cookbook author, and mycophagy researcher.  See his self-published work on patreon.com/mycophagybook.

"Erecting the Third Culinary Kingdom: A fungi-centric review of cooking literature past, present, and future"

Chef Zachary proposes that as a civilizations, as a global culture, we have been lulled into complacency in our cookbooks, positing in our hubris only TWO culinary kingdoms: plants and animals. Fungi, the alma mater of both of the former kingdoms, has been completely ignored if not willfully misunderstood. We lump "mushrooms" under M in the vegetable section, and consider our work done. Such insolence! Such ignorance! It is Chef Zachary Mazi's lifelong goal to cause the culinary world to rewrite their texts giving heed to all three culinary kingdoms, acknowledging the blindspots we have ignored, and focusing future research on expanding our new third section of knowledge. This presentation expands some of the nuance of both edible mushrooms but also the fungi we employ in all manner of cooking already, from fermentation to baking. This engrossing and informative presentation sheds light not just on cooking fungi, but on our history with cooking and with the art of cooking as a human race, urging attendees to start thinking outside of the box they didn't even know they were in!