Alaska Is Falling in Love with a Hideous Fungus

Ugliness might be relative, but the chaga fungus is just about the opposite of a beauty queen.

Touted as a superfood that's been consumed for hundreds of years in Siberia, Russia, and Eastern Europe, Inonotus obliquus is also wildly popular in parts of Asia, where parasitic fungi still enjoy plenty of popularity as traditional medicine.

But this fungus that attacks birch trees lacks the undead beauty of the cordyceps mushroom, looking a bit more like a gangrenous growth than something you'd want to put in your mouth.

And yet people have been chewing on or brewing chaga into tea since the 16th century. Some credit Gulag Archipelago author and Nobel laureate Alexandr Solzhenitsyn with introducing chaga to the West with his semi-autobiographical 1967 novel Cancer Ward, in which the main character is cured of all his ailments with a bit of tea made from the fungus. "He could not imagine any greater joy," Solzhenitsyn writes, "than to go away into the woods for months on end, to break off this chaga, crumble it, boil it up on a campfire, drink it and get well like an animal."

And lately, Alaskans have been following suit. The 49th state might be making headlines this week for becoming third in the US to legalize recreational marijuana, but this less-infamous folk medicine has been slowly making inroads among the population for years. Lately, that's turned into a full-fledged boom, with local producers selling foraged chunks of fungus—chiseled or chipped off of wild trees with a hatchet and a hammer—at up to $4 per ounce, or $18 for a two-ounce bottle of extract.

The Alaska Dispatch News reported last week that "a cottage industry surrounding chaga is growing in Alaska," with chaga slowly creeping into Alaska's cafes, where residents can just as easily get a cup of fungus tea as they can a coffee. At one Anchorage cafe, a chaga-drinker told the paper that the tea tasted "comfort-y," "subtle" and "generic."

And it's not just granola-crunching hippie-dippy spots jumping on the chaga choo-choo, either. Originale, an Italian-American eatery located inside an Anchorage shopping mall, is now selling chaga tea alongside its cannoli and mortadella sandwiches.

But what could the average, typically Republican-Libertarian Alaskan want with a tree growth that looks, at best, like a grizzly bear's dingleberry?

As with any trending superfood, the halo of purported health benefits around chaga can be blinding in its breadth. Preliminary research has found that chaga contains a couple of bioactive compounds—betulin and inotodiol—that may in fact have anti-tumor properties. But Siberian babushkas and snake oil salesmen alike have claimed for years that chaga is effective against everything from tuberculosis to HIV—even if none of those claims have been substantiated.

But even without hard scientific data to back up chaga's reputation as a cure-all, anecdotal evidence is compelling enough for some. Vena Hamilton, owner of Chaga Monkey in Willow, Alaska, credits the fungus with improving her health. "I'd been diagnosed with a variety of inflammatory diseases, and mainstream pharmacology was not working," Hamilton tells MUNCHIES. "I was skeptical [of chaga], but ready to try anything." After trying chaga tea, she regained her strength and stamina. "It took a few weeks for me, [but] I had more energy without the jitters and sleepy aftereffects of a coffee buzz. I slept longer, and awoke more refreshed. I also noticed a markedly reduced swelling of my joints."

Hamilton says that she's "not looking to make it huge" in the chaga market, but acknowledges that there has been a surge in interest lately. "I think people are becoming aware of the fact [that] our food supply is quite nutritionally empty, and our bodies are starving for nutrients, not just calories," she says. "Chaga is fairly dense in certain micronutrients, phytonutrients, some vitamins, and minerals."

Chaga Monkey's products are wild-harvested from remote birch forests in central Alaska, but Hamilton notes that the fungus "should be harvested consciously, or it could become extinct." She prepares it in a broth, and mixes it with coffee or cocoa. "Its flavor is somewhere between coffee and tea. It blends well with both sweet and savory flavors. I have been given so many varied descriptions of its flavor, it is hard to describe," she says.

Chameleonic flavor and questionable benefits aside, perhaps it's precisely chaga's lack of aesthetic charm that's driving the consumer interest. Ugliness is earthiness, and that's certainly refreshing—and marketable—in an era when most mass-produced food is processed into inoffensive pucks of sameness. Chia seed pudding might look like a pile of frog eggs, but you can bet a bowl of it at any clean-eating establishment will run you a few bucks higher than a packet of oatmeal. And we should never forget the king of turd-like fungi, the truffle.

So, cheers to you, Alaska. Spark up a legal one today while you sip your chaga.