Welcome to the Our Henhouse interview.

I am so excited about this episode.

Marian, I know you are too.

You are a mushroom fiend.

I'm not really.

I want to be.

Like I have mushroom visions of my future.

Well, this week's guest is the wonderful Ashwarya Virabahu.

Welcome to our henhouse, Ashwaya.

I'm so excited you're here.

Yeah, I'm super excited to be here.

Thank you for having me.

I got to interview you, as we were talking about earlier, for W WXXI's environmental connections. And then

I always try and slip in that I'm vegan. And then you slipped in that you were vegan. And I was

like, I always get so excited because I know that you're here to tell us everything that

vegans need to know about fungi, which is quite a lot. it turns out. But I'm going to start with a

totally off the wall question, which is as someone who cares about like environmentalism and the

climate, why aren't? And as someone, you didn't even mention that Ischwarya is a fungal ecologist.

She does have some. I was going to

PhD. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I was going to mention all that, all of the fancy stuff, but I do want to know

why more environmentalists, why don't more people care about being vegan from the environmental side of

things? I mean, I guess it's something I've been asking myself quite a lot, you know?

...