(Photo by Lily Blodgett/The Daily Illini)
This story first appeared in The Daily Illini
Peruse through your kitchen pantry and you’re likely to notice that nearly all of your ingredients are store-bought. Bananas, peanut butter, cheese — many food staples are simply too difficult to grow and prepare at home, especially compared to the easy temptation of purchasing those same items from a grocery store, ready-made and ripe for your enjoyment.
However, with the right tools and effort, some products can be grown in your kitchen or backyard at equal or better quality. Luna’s Mushrooms, an Urbana-based mushroom farm, is aiming to provide those tools to Chambana locals with their at-home mushroom grow kits.
“As we grow older, we want to become more connected to our roots, and growing plants and mushrooms is a good skill to have,” said Jingzin Duan, co-founder of Luna’s Mushrooms. “(Gardening) just makes you happier in general, and I wanted to translate that to mushroom growing with these kits that are very easy to grow.”
According to Duan, the core values of Luna’s Mushrooms are to make at-home mushroom grow kits accessible to the public, educate people on the value of mushrooms and mushroom-growing and to always be there for his customers when they need help.
With the help of his wife and co-founder Felicity Castillo, Duan tries to embody these values as much as he can by attending weekly Urbana’s Market at The Square, networking with like-minded local businesses and pushing his business on social media to become the “biggest information hub of mushrooms in all of Illinois” and eventually the U.S.
“Jing is very set on his tracks (with Luna’s Mushrooms), and I support his ideas,” said Castillo, who manages the administrative side of the business. “I also bring up other potential worries or positives in the business … I’m more towards helping provide and inform the community on (the benefits of mushrooms) and bringing them the farm-to-table, most nutritious food possible.”
In certain local aspects, Duan and Felicity have achieved just that. Luna’s Mushrooms has been featured on local television and is now the premier mushroom source for local farms like the Prairie Fruits Farm and Creamery, an avid purchaser of their oyster mushrooms.
“(Duan) really took a risk; it’s kind of a scary business to get into anything in the restaurant or farming industry especially, but he believes in (Luna’s Mushrooms) so much and his product is so good that I think they’ll be really successful,” said Garron Sanchez, executive chef at Prairie Fruits. “He’s very passionate about what he does, and he’s always been interested in what we do, and it’s just a relationship that kind of supports one another.”
Duan, who had zero experience in the business field prior to Luna’s Mushrooms, began the business right after graduating from the University. He said establishing the farm was the “hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
“It was very spontaneous; I never studied accounting, and I’m pretty bad at the business side of things, but I didn’t really want to pursue a regular job … I knew that if I didn’t (try), it was going to haunt me for the rest of my life,” Duan said. “I poured blood, sweat and tears into Luna’s Mushrooms, especially with farming, because it’s very labor intensive, your margins are very small, and we were also launching a newer product in a sense, which was mushrooms.”
Duan immigrated to the US when he was 18. He struggled with weight gain and mental health as an Illini undergraduate, problems that he credited to his poor diet and its effects on his gut microbiome, but his passion for mushroom-growing endured as a bright spot in his life.
His revelations towards his relationship with food pushed him to combine his mushroom-growing hobby with his degree in Human Nutrition and Food Science, culminating in a business that he hopes can provide both dietary knowledge and delicious fungal produce to the Champaign-Urbana community for years to come. And while his lack of business knowledge drove Luna’s Mushrooms to many highs and lows along the past two-and-a-half years of its existence, he and Castillo wholeheartedly encourage other ambitious college students to commit to their dreams like they did.
“There’s always fear of being able to get where you want to, but at the end of the day, it’s whether or not you’re okay with that fear holding you back,” Castillo said. “You can always do more at the end of the day … you’re capable of creating the life you can’t stop thinking about.”
Jude Panlilio is an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a staff writer for The Daily Illini.