mushroom marketing

Slashfood, one of my new favourite blogs, has a fun article up{.broken_link} about the business of mushroom marketing and how mushrooms have been renamed to make them sound exotic. Exotic means they can, of course, charge more for them.

It goes like this. You have agaricus bisporus, the common button mushroom. In these parts they run about $1.50 a pound. The more flavorful brown variety of the common button mushroom is the crimini. It is the same mushroom. It just tastes a little stronger, and, well, its brown. Criminis, however, run you about $2.50 a pound.

If you let a crimini grow too big, you get a portabella. Same mushroom. Same flavor. Just bigger. With a fancy name. $4 a pound.

And Slashfood mentions, and I’ve seen these in stores, the latest gimmick: baby bellas. Young portabellas! At $6 a pound. Except a young portabella is, of course, just a crimini.

Food marketing: a good job for ex-politicians.

(I got it from Slashfood{.broken_link}.)