 Imagine a scenario, you're hungry, it's late at night and you need to eat. You check and there's nothing open. When you open the fridge and see that the only food there is is a moldy piece of cheese, what do you do? You chuck it in the trash. But what if you chef Jeremy Jumanski? When Jeremy opens up his fridge and sees mold, he sees beautiful, delicious chaos. And yes, he will eat it. That's because Jeremy thinks that molds can revolutionize the food we thought we knew. But since Jeremy's food is so different, local and federal laws that were made almost 100 years ago, it prevented him from selling his food to customers. Jeremy must find ways to make his unique brand of cuisine comply with financially burdensome laws in what is already a seriously competitive industry. I'm Andrew Eaton, and this is Fee's Mind Your Business. So hanging out in your house, you've named your daughter after a mushroom. I have. My daughter, Baba Ganesh, is over there. You've got jars of laboratory experiment food that you're fermenting that are going to be turned into stuff. So you seem like you're full in on food. How did you get there? There's this concept in food called terroir. So it means in the wine world grapevine growing on this farm, on this hillside, produces a grape that has these flavors because of the composition of things in the soil and the air and the sunlight and everything. But you go a few miles down the road and it's different. Different soil, different elevation, different sunlight, all those things. A lot of chefs kind of broaden that concept of terroir because it's not just applied to grapes, it can be applied to a pig or a mushroom or anything that comes from a specific area has a specific terroir to it, a specific flavor that's indicative of the time and place that it came from. I understand Koji to be a main part of the dishes that you make. Where does mold enter your culinary set and tell me what Koji is and how it affects what you make? Hold it. You're probably thinking, Jeremy is not well in the head if he's purposefully allowing his food to mold. But mold is actually a name for a lot of different kinds of fungi that grow on organic things given the right temperature and time. Mold isn't the first thing you think of as an ingredient to world-class cuisine, but it's integral to making the most delicious things. The Nordics use a strain to make a velvety rich yogurt. The French use mold to create delectable stinky cheeses. The Italians make salami with it and vegetarians need mold to create tempeh or they'd probably have to eat dirt or something. Jeremy's beloved Koji has been used for centuries by the Japanese to create sake, soy sauce, bean paste, and miso soup. But before you start thinking that if you leave out all your food to mold, Guy Fieri's going to burst through the door. It's important to know that there's a certain art to aging your food. And of course, you should always lock your doors to stop Guy Fieri from breaking in. After you, Jeremy. The Koji itself, the mold is aspergillus orese. We're finding that if you look at Pinnell J. Vensi's and you look at orese, the aspergillus, the Koji does the same thing that the penicillin mold is doing, but it does it ridiculously fast. So we're talking about taking months or potentially years for some pieces of meat to hang and for these molds to do what they need to do to help create the cured meat. We're taking that into like days and weeks now. So with terroir, you've got all these different foods that you're making from where you live or near where you live. How do you go about doing that? It's really simple. We just go walk outside. I thought we were going to go out in the middle of the wilderness, but we're in a municipal park. Yeah. Yeah, we essentially are. We're going to look at some of the trees that are easy to identify without leaves and we'll get some barks and we'll use those barks in different ways. And in fact, I see a great tree over here. We can take a walk. This is a shagbark hickory. Let's go take a look at it. Great. People smoke with hickory wood all the time. And this tree is great because it gets its name shagbark because you see how shaggy the bark is. How much of this do you need to make a sauce or whatever it spices, whatever you're making? If we're smoking with it, I could probably smoke 50 pounds of meat with like a handful like this. It's not just about the smoking, it's we get the nut and we can use the nut any way you use the nut in cooking. We can make the root beer and that root beer syrup, we can turn into a sorbet. And that's a huge part about identifying these foods. We want to be able to use it for as many different things as possible. Well, let's keep walking and finding other things. These grasses, when they're nice and green, have this wonderful sweet grass aroma to them. And what we'll do is when we smoke our fish or when we cook different foods like root vegetables, we'll take these fresh grasses or even these dried ones and we wrap the food up in it. And as it's cooking, it permeates the food. We just found some onion grass. So these are a wild species of onion or garlic. Kind of hard to tell in this stage, but from nibbling on a little piece, it's definitely nice and onion-y. Okay, I'm getting kind of hungry. Can we implement some of this foraging and eat some things? Let's go. All right. Let's get you full. Okay, so you've assembled what appears to me to be a collection of 14th century alchemy ingredients. But I understand these to be actual foods or elements of foods. Walk me through what I'm about to eat. I thought it'd be most appropriate that we kind of start with some of the things made from some of the foraging. Sure. That makes sense, yeah. This is vinegar made from eastern white pine pinecones. It's vinegary. I rather like that. Let's grab that other jar of fish you see there. This would be the giant jar of fish here. And those are smelt from Lake Erie. They're smelt? It's a type of fish. Okay. And this one's the one that I'm most concerned about because it's a bunch of fish and I can see them in the eye. At Larder at my delicatessen, one of our missions has been to reconnect people with their food. We don't want you to keep going along in this sterilized, industrialized food culture. We want you to realize that there's more to life than just chicken breast. Okay. We'll cut this up into some manageable chunks here. Good. I'm going to just like try and slide it down my gullet, smelt, chew it, and then see what happens. Yeah. I'm going to eat a piece too. Do you eat the head? I do. Wow. Okay. All right. Going for it. Just one bite. So this is Koji what I'm looking at. Yeah. This is the mold that is growing on rice. Very fuzzy looking. Very fuzzy looking. All right. So go for that one. Yeah. Kind of swish it around your tongue and think about this compared to like if you got some white steamed rice, you know, it's actually pretty sweet. Like it comes off sugary like almost like a dessert or something and it's kind of chewy as well. Yeah. And that's the magic of Koji. Okay. So the front leg and shoulder of the pig. This is the Koji mold. Yeah. And like you go to like I said an Italian deli or something, you see salamis that have molds like this on the outside. We're able to grow the mold on this meat and accelerate the whole drying and aging time. To produce a ham about that size, we're talking about a good year. We were able to slice into this ham after 38 days of hanging. Really? We've got some of it cut up right here. I'm very excited about it. I feel like I'm going to be eating forest pig. That's the idea. You know, we can tell a complete story about this animal, where it came from and what it did during its life in a single bite. Yeah. Like I was expecting pepperoni, but it's got this, the texture is pork, right? Yeah. I have identified the flavor as such because it's been altered so much. I don't think I've tasted this kind of flavor before. So thank you. You're welcome. And this is going to be going into your restaurant larger, which is near completion, but not finished yet. Can we check that out? We should definitely complete the puzzle and go check it out. Great. Yeah, let's go see it. What kind of things do you have to do in terms of regulation before you're good to go? Do you need to get a license? Do you have to check for the city? There is a surprising amount of bureaucracy involved with opening up a food service establishment. So because we make so many things from scratch, right? We don't order in from like an approved facility or that sort of thing. We were really concerned, like, is this even going to be approved? Most food service establishments in America and most food service jurisdictions realize that there's not enough people to enforce all the laws. Restaurant owners and chefs, they don't want to sicken people. That's the last thing you want to do. That means your business is potentially closing. Would it be fair then that your reputation is a big part of what would keep you from getting in trouble and just your personal desire to do a good job? Sure, because my reputation as a safe chef who produces good food that people want to eat, that's what fuels my business. That's what brings people in the door. If the city organizations that you have to go through or the USDA or some large sector were to just take a break for a year, what do you think the effect would be on the food industry? I honestly don't think there'd be much change. As individual proprietors, individual chef owners, they put a lot of thought into what they're sourcing, what they're doing with their food. They want the highest quality ingredients. They want the safest food. And they're making a decision not to use some of those industrial supply chain ingredients. And they're going above and beyond to essentially police themselves. Talk to me a little bit about the risk that you undertake when you're starting a restaurant, because you're it now, right? Yeah. For the past two years, I have not had a steady paycheck coming in. I mean, we went from being nearly a six-figure income household to, I believe, last year we pulled in about $40,000. What is the reward that you're getting either now or in the future, should the scope gangbusters? I think the reward is control over the concept of destiny. I'm not relying on somebody giving me at will employment. There's going to be tons of blood, sweat, and tears that go into this process. And there's going to be moments when you can't pay your rent and there's going to be moments when your spouse hates you. But on the flip side, there's going to be so many times when you can embrace your spouse and hug and laugh. And there's going to be so many times where you feel satisfied after a good day's of work. And there's going to be joyous occasions. And those are going to be so much bigger, even if they're on the same level on paper, so much bigger and so much more gratifying than any of the negative things that happen. After talking with Jeremy, I'm pretty stoked to do my own foraging for food. And he spoke a lot about mold and safety. And to be honest with you, I kind of tuned out during that part. But I have thought about some things to consider. How much liability should food producers have? And how much liability should food consumers have? Should we be able to eat tasty things even if they're potentially dangerous? If negative repercussions happen, who should bear the responsibility for it and who decides that? Finally, do we need additional government oversight at all? I know I don't.