My Kingdom For A Mushroom - Burn Down the Forest!

Burn It All for the Mushrooms: The Smoky Quest for Thailand's Truffles

Ah, Chiang Mai, land of misty mountains, tranquil temples, and a three-month period every year when you can’t see any of it because the air turns into a smoky apocalypse. Why? Sure, some of it’s due to large-scale agriculture and cross-border burning, but a surprising amount of haze comes from a much humbler source: villagers setting the forest on fire to hunt for mushrooms.

Not just any mushrooms, but the illustrious het thob (เห็ดถอบ), also known as earthstar mushrooms or Astraeus hygrometricus. These round, truffle-like fungi are delicious, elusive, and most importantly, they thrive in recently burned forest soil. So, come dry season, locals grab their lighters and head to the hills to light things up, unfortunately literally.

To be fair, this isn't just chaos for chaos’ sake. It’s tradition, it's seasonal income, it's dinner. These mushrooms fetch high prices at the market and can mean serious cash for rural families. But when everyone burns the forest at once, you get the full “Chiang Mai in March” effect: air so smoky it feels like you're breathing through a grilled pork skewer.

Officials issue fire bans. Signs go up. Drones patrol. People swear they won’t burn anything this year, right before mysteriously “accidental” fires pop up in all the best mushroom-hunting zones. Some things never change. Sigh.

So if you’re in the north during burn season and wondering why the sky looks like the intro to a dystopian film, just know: it’s probably not an environmental disaster. It’s mushroom season.

Delicious? Yes. Ethical? Depends who you ask. Smoky? Always.

More information here.