From the Ground Up: How Maine Food and Climate Efforts Mirror the Mycelium Layer

January 15, 2025

By Lea Camille Smith       

Thousands of years ago, Aristotle posited that art imitates life; that the creative expressions of humans were a direct reaction to their lived experiences. In 1889, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde flipped that notion on its head, writing instead that life imitates art. From Wilde’s point of view, art helps us to see more of the world. It inspires us to look deeper. 

Long debated — and most likely never resolved — the argument recalls the imitative relationship between our modern-day internet and what conservationist Jane Morgan Galleto refers to as the internet of the forest. Thanks to a vast collection of radio waves, cables, computers, wires, and more, the world can communicate, research, and find entertainment and resources with the click of a mouse or tap of a finger through the internet. Yet there is another network living just beneath our feet, responsible for fungi growth, decomposition, and even communication: a seemingly ancient model of the world wide web.

If you’ve ever lifted a fallen log in a forest and encountered a network of white, thread-like filaments, you have probably discovered the mycelium layer. From this network, and with the right environment and moisture levels, the mycelium layer puts out mushrooms, which are its fruiting bodies. Make no mistake, though, the mycelium layer is not the roots of the mushroom, but rather a structure that produces and feeds the mushrooms and connects trees and plants together. Just as the internet can connect people through communication platforms, researcher Suzanne Simard found that the mycelium layer can connect different species of trees together for carbon transferal. Through the mycelium layer, a paper birch and a Douglas fir can send nutrients to each other. In return, the trees provide the mycelium with carbohydrates and sugars, two compounds that it is unable to make, allowing it to continue creating healthy soil. It is a symbiotic relationship for all.  

As one of the oldest life forms, fungi are almost inextricably a part of our everyday lives, and the actions of ever-growing human networks prove to be just as beneficial to the food system as the mycelial networks beneath the earth’s surface.

I landed a communications and development internship at the Maine Food Convergence Project (MFCP) while working towards my graduate degree. In the fledgling weeks of my internship I couldn’t help but notice the process of biomimetics at work. Biomimetics or biomimicry is when human issues and problems are solved using systems related to nature. As a lifelong gardener, who has lifted the log many times and peered into the curious world of mycelium, I saw that the MFCP was emulating an ancient and important web beneath me. The MFCP works with various network partners to strengthen food, climate, and land justice systems across Maine. These partners include Maine Farm & Sea to Institution, Maine Food Strategy, Maine Network of Community Food Councils, Maine Gleaning Network, Maine Youth for Climate Justice & Maine Climate Action NOW!, and Full Plates Full Potential. Each network partner comes from their own web of contacts and communication, and thus the network continues, creating avenues of trust, shared goals, and communication. 

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, Maine is among the top three states — following Vermont and preceding Hawaii — in farm-to-table infrastructure efforts. There are countless farmers’ markets, food banks, and many food systems nonprofits and organizations working to better food, climate, and equity systems.

However, Maine also has high rates of food insecurity, poverty, and structural barriers to accessing healthy, culturally nourishing, and nutrient-dense food, and there’s a lack of communication between food and climate systems workers. 

In 2019, five of the seven network partners began a conversation about their own yearly summits, and how a collaborative effort between all five of the organizations’ events and event-planning efforts would save time, money, and other resources, and would foster a spirit of collaboration rather than competition. In 2020, Annie Doran was hired as a project coordinator to facilitate the first convergence event that would bring all the network partners together with community members, farmers, and other food system workers to solve pertinent issues related to food, climate, and equity. 

The first convergence event in 2021 brought together 300 local organizers and allies. Specific priorities became evident in that first event, leading to MFCP’s updated purpose: year-round bridge building between food and climate and land justice systems workers, while also planning and facilitating future convergence events, to happen every two years. Another outcome from the 2021 convergence was the first work group, the Food Processing Infrastructure Work Group. Work groups are direct responses to the needs of the priority lists that arise during the convergence events. After the 2023 event, two more were formed: the Shared Communications Work Group, facilitated by the MFCP communications manager, Lauren Olson, and the Climate and Food System Work Group. 

Maine Food Convergence Project
Participants at the 2023 convergence. The 2025 convergence is slated for May 29, 2025, in Jefferson, Maine. Saga Hart photo

The Food Processing Infrastructure Work Group — co-facilitated by Doran along with Alida Farrell, a MFCP network partner through Maine Farm & Sea to Institution (MEFTI) — is an example of a relationship mirroring that of the mycelium and surrounding trees and other flora. To Farrell, the collaboration between MEFTI and the MFCP to create the Food Processing Infrastructure Work Group has been “instrumental in advancing network priorities around promoting processing-related interventions that generate high-impact shifts towards getting more local, culturally nourishing food to institutional markets.” Because of this mutually beneficial relationship, MEFTI’s collaborative efforts are strengthened through MFCP’s communications, while MFCP’s network-building efforts are strengthened by having shared goals across the food system. Within the network, and with leadership from the Maine Farm & Sea Cooperative, the Maine Marinara Collaborative was created. The collaborative, Farrell says, “increases processor and farmer capacity, addresses the economic benefits of local food, and establishes a foundation for increased purchasing of local and equitable products by Maine institutions.” From these efforts and connections, Maine-made marinara sauce is now on the cafeteria menu in 19 Maine school districts, with many of the ingredients, like tomatoes, carrots, squash, and onions sourced from five local Maine farms. School districts, farmers, processing facilities, and families are directly and positively impacted by these collaborative efforts, leading to healthier communities and farming economies. 

This is just one of the many examples of a network partner and work group in action under the umbrella of the MFCP. Other collaborations worth noting are the Community of Maine Food Advocates, formed as a response to the gap between impacted community members and their influence on legislation; the New England Food System Planners Partnership, composed of six New England food initiative groups working to strengthen food systems; and the SCONE Coalition, which works with communicators to transform food, equity, and climate narratives into stories that inspire community change and action (MOFGA is a participant). To envision these groups, alliances, and efforts is to see the densely knit parts of the mycelium layer that converge together in larger concentrations, with strands emanating from these points, connecting to other concentrations elsewhere in a web of shared work.  

To Doran, the MFCP project director, this collaborative movement of ever-growing and changing networks is the key to making sustainable progress. “It is wise to build projects based on trusting partnerships,” she says. “This work of continually meeting and building relationships in the network leads to ease in project development and implementation, saving resources in the long run. And it doesn’t just stop in Maine.”

For the MFCP and their network partners, this work can’t help but serve as a model for sustainable change in food, climate, and equity work beyond Maine. Yet we mustn’t forget the original model. As I sit in on the biweekly partner meetings over Zoom, in awe of the work that has been done, and inspired by what’s to come, I can’t help but see the weblike structures of the mycelium layer continually connecting pines, birches, ferns, mushrooms, and so on as it continues to grow, nurture, and support everything around it. 

The Maine Food Convergence Project will host their 2025 convergence on May 29, 2025, at the Kieve Wavus campus in Jefferson, Maine. To find out more about the event and MFCP’s mission, vision, and ongoing projects, visit their website at mainefoodconvergence.org

Lea Camille Smith is an MFA student, the executive editor for the Stonecoast Review, and a freelance writer. She resides in the Mount Washington Valley of New Hampshire. Her work can be found in The Tiger Moth Review, Island Ink, The MOF&G, Mt Washington Valley Vibe, the Conway Daily Sun, and elsewhere. Follow her on Instagram at @leacamillesmith.

This article originally appeared in the winter 2024-2025 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.

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