Edible mushrooms in Puerto Rico and their applications in sustainable development
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30550/j.lil/1817Keywords:
Edible mushrooms, mycophagy, specialty cropsAbstract
Puerto Rico is one of the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean whose population is still discovering the nutritional value of mushrooms. However, some pre-Columbian groups used mushrooms as part of their diet. With the arrival of Europeans, mycophagy developed a little more on the island, but not enough to have a historical record on the subject. Currently, some species of Auricularia, Agaricus and Psathyrellaceae are considered edible in Puerto Rico. In the 1980s there was an interest in developing commercial mushroom crops. Several investigations on the subject at the Agricultural Experimental Station of the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus studied the production of Volvariella volvacea and Pleurotus species. Many of these efforts were not consolidated into commercial ventures until almost the late 1990s and the beginning of the new century. In recent times, with the entry of organic or sustainably produced foods, there has been an increase in the consumption of mushrooms, incorporated into typical Puerto Rican recipes and dishes. Edible mushroom development has been around cash crops of Agaricus and Pleurotus. Some local sustainable mushroom cultivation ventures based on compost derived from vegetable waste, are of limited production and distributed to restaurants, local natural/health food vendors or sold to the public at agricultural fairs. As for the legislation or regulations on mushroom cultivation in Puerto Rico, there is little that has been established. There are no specific regulations, laws and/or provisions on mushroom cultivation, for commercial purposes or for sustainable development. Many of the local enterprises are covered by regulations or laws of specialty crops or for hydroponic crops. Finally, we can highlight that there are pharmaceutical studies on the antibacterial and anticancer properties of the fractions of polysaccharides, triterpenes and extracts of fungi cultivable in Puerto Rico of species of the genus Ganoderma. These provide great potential in the development of new technologies for the study of edible mushroom bioproducts.
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