After months of lemmy lurking, this is the comment that broke my heart enough to join. Sorry for your loss. Ziploc bags are terrible for long term food preservation.
I don’t forage mushrooms but buy them from a local grower then dehydrated them and store them in mason or wire bail gasketed jars. This works fine, they last as long as you would expect dehydrated food to last (1 to 3 years if you observe food storage rules, longer if you allow sight/smell/texture breakdown to guide you).
Light exposure is important as well, keep them away from direct light or in the dark (a cabinet) as much as possible.
I’m more of the “how did our ancestors handle feeding their families before modern conveniences” camp but there are the “throw a bunch of money at things labelled ‘prepping’ and hoard all the things we don’t eat in a normal day” camp.
Things I’ve seen people do in the latter to extend how long they retain quality is adding oxygen absorbers (different from silica) to the following:
- vacuum seal in mason jars with a special jar attachment,
- vacuum seal in vacuum sealing-specific clear plastic with a special machine,
- (vacuum seal?) in mylar bags.
These are a bit overkill and definitely beyond your “cheap” request. Having 10 years of dried mushrooms would be… unappetising and detrimental to storage economy.
Plus you risk killing off local communities and depriving other foragers for the year when you don’t follow the 10% rule (don’t take more than 10% of what you see from a location).
I forage, just not mushrooms or from the carrot family. Knowing how and where to find something with a stash to keep you two years in case of a bad harvest is all you need.
I started a new role at a multi national corporation a couple months ago. My “onboarding” to try to get caught up on a new project involved shifting through thousands of pages and slides of AI generated content that had been created on this project… Which ironically is about creating systems to try to make AI return more relevant results. The company have paid me a small fortune in the hours I spent reading material that held no value but to make someone somewhere look like they were being productive at some point in time.