"After the Portobello, It's Mushroom Mania"

"Farms where only white mushrooms had been cultivated are now sprouting brown domestic varieties, as well as shiitake, enoki and oyster mushrooms. And hundreds of dark, cavernous mushroom houses are being converted to brightly lighted laboratories where formerly wild mushrooms can be grown in trim plastic containers under antiseptic conditions.

Largely because of the intense competition here, in many food stores across the nation, the mushroom section is starting to look like a magical playground for gnomes. Today's cooks can choose from dozens of weird, formerly wild mushrooms...

By the late 1980's, only a handful of people had heard of portobello mushrooms. In 1997, 32.7 million pounds of the big brown mushrooms valued at more than $47 million were sold. (But however exotic portobellos may have seemed, they are actually just overgrown crimini mushrooms, the common brown variety that America considered normal until the mushrooms called whites, or buttons, began their reign in the mid-1920's.)"
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/04/dining/after-the-portobello-it-s-mushroom-mania.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

What???