1)     For over a decade, Jim foraged for wild foods as part of a ‘self-sufficient’ lifeway in the Oregon Cascades.
2)    Developments in family matters brought Jim out of the mountains, and, with it, an awareness that in his absence from the world of produce commerce, a domestic wild mushroom industry had blossomed lacking the professionalism of industry in other produce.  He applied some, and it quickly became obvious that the market was hungry for high quality wild mushrooms from environmentally clean sources – which he now knew Oregon had aplenty.
3)    Jim made indelible marks on the domestic wild fungi industry:  Selling bulk fresh Chanterelle mushrooms in 5 cosmetic grades, from high-priced to dirt-cheap.  Selling extra-large fresh Morel mushrooms as a premium, “stuffer” grade.  Selling giant mushrooms of all varieties at Specimen prices for display and/or bid sales at the retail level. Establishing a successful working model of a new paradigm in management of federal wild mushrooms lands – a shift from the long-standing paradigm of “buy a permit to fight it out with other pickers, be assumed by federal law enforcement to be picking illegally, you are on your own as to where to find any, and stop bothering me with this silly mushroom stuff other than to give me your money in order to help justify my job” – to a paradigm of mutual respect between federal land managers, permitees, and federal law enforcement that embraces permitees as vital to effective stewarding of valuable resources. 
4)    Jim became aware that Oregon Truffles had deservedly earned a poor reputation (due to rampant carelessness) and were thus headed for the dust bin of history.  With a track record of making diamonds out of coal (so to speak) he set himself to the challenge.
5)    Sure enough, his particular characteristics, experience set, and various other resources shortcut the process – in what likely would have taken others 10 years or more to accomplish, Jim succeeded in as many months of experimentation – developing approaches and methods that enabled every Oregon Truffle he sold to provide a memorable culinary experience.  Through Jim’s hands, Oregon Truffles became world-class gems.

And, so, he also founded OWE! to pioneer a movement to re-invent the Oregon Truffle industry to rest on a foundation of environmental stewardship, and thus sustainability.

The story up through the 2008 Oregon Truffle Festival has, so far, best been told in an article in FUNGI Magazine (Volume 1, Number 4, “Pots of Gold at Ends of Rainbows”.  Jim saw the nascent FUNGI magazine project as destined to be the sorely-needed myco-information vehicle for North America, and thus gave to it of himself at the time by robbing from his livelihood, personal relationships, and his sleep.)  The telling of the rest of the story awaits a vehicle with far greater capacity.

The marks he made on the wild mushroom business were, to Jim, ‘no brainers’.  All of them but one he expected would quickly proliferate.  The paradigm shift thing.  It was only a first step in what would surely take some time to evolve.  It certainly took special talents and perseverance to manifest that step.  But that was nothing compared to what was in store for Jim regarding his visions for Oregon Truffles. At first he saw those visions also as no-brainers, but his Oregon Truffle task would turn out to be an uphill battle to overcome enormous inertia.  It would require all he had.  In fact, he termed it a “crusade”.  Just the sheer number of hours, bent over piles of truffles, inspecting, paring, and making decisions about each one, over and over again for as many days as each truffle was in his possession, every day for 150 days in a row every year would be demanding enough.  He was in for a sore neck and bleary eyes, to say the least.  Other costs – such as the time and stress of interactions with truffle harvesters infected with ‘gold-rush fever’, discarded material, and underpinning the Oregon Truffle Festival – would only add to the load.  But Jim anticipated that his Oregon Truffles, as “essentially a whole new product” (according to a grandfather of California’s Sustainable Community Agriculture movement) would quickly enough turn heads that others would soon adopt his ways and ‘economies of scale’ would then follow, fueling the development of easier means by which to provide world-class Oregon Truffles, via the market, from ground to table.

However, on the Oregon Wild Edibles ! watch, that was not to be.  Among the media’s Oregon Truffle promotion darlings, Jim and about two close associates not only remained the lone-persons-out on Jim’s positions in the world of Oregon Truffle politics, the other darlings that claimed to be on the quality/stewardship team proved to be more about creating sizzle than providing steak. And, as anyone paying attention knows, the media prefers sizzle to steak.  So much so, that even when using Jim and/or his several close associates as sources for stories, even most bites of steak presented to readers, listeners, and viewers were seasoned with sensationalism instead of accuracy.  Even if giving the benefit of the doubt to the other darlings – that is, to assume they truly meant to support Jim’s positions – their belief in sizzle as the only effective tool with which to change the image of Oregon Truffles still seems to have led them to mis-represent to the media Jim’s concepts, what he was, what he did, how he did it, and why he did it, even if they mentioned Jim at all.  The audiences became distracted from the paths of viable reform by celebrity glitter.

OWE! never made it out of the red on a year-‘round basis, but Jim continued to be buoyed along by:

A)    the kudos received from certain renowned international truffle experts,
B)    the appreciation from gourmand customers whose ranks slowly grew by word-of-mouth,
C)    the opportunities to show-off record-sized Oregon Truffles to eager crowds and photographers,
D)   the invitations to supply and entertain at such prestigious gastronomical events as Oregon-themed dinners at the James Beard House in Manhattan, New York, former home of that "father of American gastronomy" and current home of the James Beard Foundation, which bestows upon American chefs the most coveted of culinary awards, and
E)    testimonials from domestic chefs Jim admired (such as Jerry Traunfeld, 17 years the executive chef for the The Herb Farm, in Woodinville, Washington.  Jerry wrote this when he got his first shipment of truffles from Jim in December, 2006, along with Jim’s apologies because he had to scrape the bottom of his barrel to fill Jerry’s last-minute order in the face of the failure of Traunfeld’s usual supplier:  "I just received your truffles. I am not as concerned about how they look as I am about how they smell.  These are the best quality I have seen in the 15 years I have been using Northwest truffles. Your care in handling them is quite evident.")

With previous, unique, precedent-setting successes as a social and environmental activist under his belt, Jim was also motivated to continue his Oregon Truffle crusade because of the myriad of facets of Oregon Truffles that he saw as vitally important to the evolution of a saner society, particularly in his beloved Oregon.  Knowing that, one might be tempted (by stereotypical images of such activists) to assume that it was this aspect of Oregon Truffles that gave him the most ‘juice’.  Certainly, Jim was known to say that he would not be continuing to put himself through the mill of the super-human effort his crusade required of him were it not for the fact that Oregon Truffles provided him a subject matter, a forum and a pulpit with which to convince persons with influence on politicians to stump them for the need to protect Pacific Northwest forests and to re-design rural land-management and economic paradigms.

However, anyone who knew Jim Wells then saw what really put the bounce in his steps:


As time went on, with a little help from his friends, Jim evermore became convinced that this incredibly special, culinary treasure we had, literally right under our feet, would never be “saved” until their culinary lexicon was developed properly – until home cooks and any chef could confidently and easily use them to magically transform their dishes.  And he evermore exclaimed that what seemed to be passing for the development of this lexicon was being horribly misguided by so many truffle-cooking-wanna’-be-gurus falling over themselves and one another to try to secure ground-floor market share in marquee presence and “how-to” information.

However, as the kind of cook that burns water (which Jim did with enough regularity that he had long ago resigned himself to using the same pans he had scorched whilst in college in the early 1970s) he never felt up to the task. As well, having swung the sword for so long to slay dragons, unmask pretenders, and to otherwise counter the otherwise Oregon Truffle misguided/misguiders, he would have had a hard time getting away from all that politics to focus solely on gastronomical creativity.

So, he kept waiting for a chef to come along that had all the ‘ingredients’ to do it for him.  Because compounding Oregon Truffles with butter is so easy to do, that was the extent of Jim’s own truffle ‘cooking’ – that, and the R&D work he did on Oregon Truffle products (a pursuit consistent with his former organic chemistry research days.)  But, Jim rarely did either – he preferred to take an impressive Oregon Truffle to a restaurant, put it prominently on his table, tell the curious server to please take it back to the chef and ask the chef to choose a dish to use some of it in for Jim’s dining pleasure, and to please keep the rest for further creative efforts.

Just as various factors began to add up to the possibility for the financial viability of Oregon Wild Edibles !, further developments in family matters and calls to assist good friends in deep holes filled with quicksand caused Jim to decide to abandon the conduct of that business.  Serendipitously, however, various other factors were adding up to make it possible for another business to step into the breach that created – a business even more focused on Oregon Truffles – a business that would facilitate the development of the Oregon Truffle culinary lexicon of Jim’s desire – a business operated by the only other person on the planet with Jim’s particular understanding of Oregon Truffles, demonstrably capable of expanding that understanding, and who just also happened to culinarily “get” Oregon Truffles (and had never burned water . . .)

And that possibility manifested.

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