White Mushrooms Can Be Traced to a Pennsylvania Farm in 1925
Depending on how much diversity your store offers, you might only have a small number of selections if you go shopping for mushrooms right now. However, if they do sell fresh mushrooms at all, they will likely be those white ones known as table or button mushrooms. They can all be linked to a single Pennsylvania farm in the year 1925 and are most likely the most widespread kind in the Western world.
Mushrooms were mostly brown before 1925. Today, brown cremini mushrooms may be sold next to white button mushrooms in your local supermarket; other than their color, they are visually similar. Because they essentially are, that is. At Keystone Mushroom Farm, Louis Ferdinand Lambert was cultivating brown mushrooms when he spotted a white one in the batch. It was a mutation, purely accidental. He took that one back to his lab and grew the spores because he was a budding amateur mycologist.
The white mushrooms had more consistent size and shape as well as quicker growth. The country's largest mushroom crop by 1933, it soon produced tens of millions of pounds of mushrooms annually. Customers preferred the color and shape, and today's most popular mushroom is still a result of one small mutant from 1925.
