You wouldn't know it by the local cuisine, but a wide variety of wild, edible mushrooms, including morels, grow in Costa Rica, says Milagro Mata, mushroom expert at the National Biodiversity Institute (INBio).

The institute has devised a scheme to make a little fungus go a long way: raise awareness about wild mushrooms and involve struggling communities in the process of growing and selling them here and abroad.

INBio is building a mushroom research and harvesting center in its INBio Park in Santo Domingo de Heredia, north of San José, which could be open and running by next year.

On a recent trip to Guatemala, Mata says she saw mushroom awareness among the locals. “Indigenous people were eating (wild mushrooms) and selling them off the side of the road to tourists,” she says. That's when the idea clicked.

Ticos eat run-of-the-mill button and oyster mushrooms, often from cans and without much natural flavor, according to Mata.

There are more than 100 species of wild mushrooms in the world, many of them considered to have medicinal properties that can help lower cholesterol, blood pressure or glucose levels.

“We don't have fungi-culture. Mushrooms are low in fat and nutritious. There needs to be education about the benefits of eating mushrooms,” she says.