What happened at Smallhold?

Over the last five years, mushrooms have seemingly been everywhere, achieving zeitgeist-y star status that’s spanned pop culture, fashion, material science, and the broader sustainability discourse.

And if there was any company that seemed to encapsulate the mushroom moment of the last few years, it was Brooklyn-based culinary mushroom startup Smallhold, which found itself both riding that wave and helping propel it. The company was selling in 1,400 stores across the country just six years after its founding in a shipping container, earned a wide range of buzzy media coverage, and was valued at $90m at its peak.

“Mushrooms are one of the most sustainable calories on the planet, in every aspect,” co-founder Andrew Carter told me, whether you’re looking at water, waste, plastic use or greenhouse gas emissions. “We just wanted to get more people eating them.”

So it came as a disappointing shock to many who had been following the company when the founders both stepped down this spring and Smallhold announced that it was filing for bankruptcy shortly thereafter.

What happened at Smallhold? And what lessons can the company’s rise and fall offer to other entrepreneurs hoping to use their businesses to help fix our broken food system? I dug into that in my latest story for the Guardian, which you can read in full here.

Meanwhile in Atmos, a few more stories that I edited for the latest print issue have rolled out online, including this one by Jason P. Dinh on what humanity can learn from our species’ closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos; and this one by Erin Wong on the mountain communities fighting for the climate change-threatened glaciers that have shaped their lives.

This newsletter is coming to you in the little pocket between two mad rushes: after the busy but invigorating whirlwind that was Climate Week NYC, where I moderated or participated in a panel every day but one (whew!), and before I head off to the Reducetarian Summit, where I’ll be moderating a panel on bringing plant-based food to the masses, and the Textile Exchange conference, where I’ll be hosting the whole dang thing. If you’ll be at either event, please come introduce yourself.

I’ll leave you with “Twenty-One Elegies,” a poem I was thrilled to commission from Danez Smith for Atmos Volume 9. As the name suggests, this poem is full of grief, an elegy to lost species: “awful / kings, everything we touch we bless out of existence. / what will be alive at the end of us?” Smith asks. And yet I find, even in the midst of the mourning, a lining of hope, however thin, in the closing beat suggesting that our prayers for a different world are still worth praying.

Wishing you the stubbornness to keep entreating the birds to fly by god’s ear to ask for rain,
Whitney