Running with Mushrooms is a world mushroom tour, podcast and blog exploring myco-culture.
It’s also an insights and foresights consultancy to the global, fast-growing mushroom industry.
Hi, I’m Jess Jorgensen—a Cultural Strategist, really into mushrooms.
Running with Mushrooms is my world mushroom tour exploring global myco-culture.
After 67+ ethnographies and interviews with mycologists, mushroom start-ups, mycopreneurs, innovators and thinkers in Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia (and counting!), it’s become:
SporeSight*: An Insights & Foresights Consultancy, For mushroom and psychedelics brands, start-ups, mycopreneurs, NGOs or agencies interested in understanding the ‘shroom boom’, I can help you make sense of this fast-evolving category. Reach out to see how we can work together: jess@runningwithmushrooms.com
*SporeSight is sporulating! It’s turning into an actual company. Launching Q1 2025. Watch this space!!
A Mush Collective: A network of mushroom folk, as I help to connect mycologically curious people. I’ve built a network of 200+ amazing mushroom folks, NGOs and businesses working with mushrooms or psilocybin around the world.
Running with Mushrooms: A podcast & blog of my world mushroom tour, exploring how the ‘shroom boom’ is affecting people and culture, with occasional behind-the-scenes dairies of my journey from a full time Director-level career to running with a fungi passion. Follow the tour on Instagram / LinkedIn
Mostly, it’s a series of great chats with mushroom folk about mushroom stuff!
My story
I’m a Cultural Strategist, Ethnomycologist and Amateur Mycologist based in London.
I’m currently a Global Consumer Insight & Planning Manager at The Absolut Group, while setting up a mushroom business. For 16+ years I worked as a Director of Cultural and Consumer Insights at great agencies like BAMM, Flamingo and Instant Grass, helping big brands get strategic at the intersect of people and culture.
In 2023 I started exploring a wild passion for mushrooms, diving into fungi cultures and subcultures: from Ethnography (study of humans) to EthnoMycology (study of humans and mushrooms).
I’m now working to merge these two worlds.
Why subscribe to my newsletter?
Never miss a chat. New podcast or blog post every few weeks, with:
Stories of people working with mushrooms for positive change
Better ways of living and working from fungi
How to navigate some mushy controversial topics
Inspiration from successful mushroom businesses
How to work with or get into mushrooms
Some great dinner party conversation starters
and mush more
Why mushrooms??
Simply, I love fungi. Researching and geeking out about fungi is weird, rewarding, radical, polite civil disobedience.
Fungi offer so many ways to challenge and disrupt outdated systems and status quo that aren’t serving us. In food, health, materials, the environment and more.
In the words of Doug Bierand, In Search of Myctopia:
“Part of the growing appeal of fungi is that they represent means, examples, and ways of thinking through which we might subvert an unsustainable status quo.”
Why “Running with Mushrooms”?
Mycelium runs. The delicate fine filaments of the ‘root’ structure of mushrooms silently—and quickly—break down plant and animal debris, recycling carbon, nitrogen and other essential elements while making new soil. This project is running with mycelium, as each chat leads to another like a literal mycelial network.
I hope you’re inspired to geek out with me 🍄
