The Trouble With Truffles

PARIS - December 24, as I recently wrote, is typically the biggest truffle-eating night of the year in France. But Périgord black truffles, the Rolls Royce of truffles, seem to be suffering from a climatic trend toward hotter and drier summers in their native habitats of southwestern France and Spain.

Other factors have also been implicated in the decades-long decline of the truffle harvest, but whatever the reasons for it, scarcity generates high prices - Tuber melanosporum retails for about "2,000 a kilogram in Paris, or $1,200 a pound. That has led to renewed efforts to cultivate the prized fungus as far away as Australia and the United States.

A recent story in The Times profiled a truffle-growing movement in the Northwestwen United States< /a>. Businesses like New World Truffieres and American Truffle Company sell would-be truffle growers seedlings that have been inoculated with truffle spores, with the hope that the fungus will flourish in new ground. American dog trainers stand ready to make Fido into a prized truffle hound.

The root-inoculation approach has been known since the 1800s, but modern techniques are improving the success rate for what remains a difficult and unreliable process.

The dizzyingly high price also creates opportunities for the unscrupulous. “Truffles are under siege because they're getting scarce,” a 60 Minutes report on CBS News put it. “They're trafficked like drugs, stolen by thugs, and being threatened by inferior imports from China.”

60 Minutes focused darkly on the latter concern: Tuber fraud, in which the Chinese black truffle, which closely resembles the Périgord black truffle in appearance, is foisted on unsuspecting buyers at Périgord black truffle prices. Because the two are similar in appearance, it is an easy matter for truffle dealers to dishonestly pass off the inferior variety, perhaps slipping a few into a box of the real thing; the incentive, of course is that because it is vastly cheaper, that can mean a huge ill-gotten profit.

Eduardo Manzanares, the proprietor of Truffes Folies in Paris, a shop-restaurant specializing in truffles and truffle products, told me that not everyone could see the difference between the Chinese variety, Tuber himalayensis, and the Périgord black truffle, but that there could be no confusing the two in a taste test.

“They taste like a turnip,” he said of the imitators, “like a potato. Like nothing.”

But the truffle business was a tricky one before Chinese products entered the mix. Consider some of the elements that make it opaque: arcane pricing, the necessity for secrecy about the harvest (would you advertise the ground where you found that $1,000 tuber?), a culture of tax evasion in some of the most important habitats and tight-lipped non-public companies.

Olga Urbani, who acts as a spokeswoman for Urbani Tartufi, the Italian truffle giant, told me her company controls about three-quarters of the market. (More precisely, when I asked her if it was true that her company controlled about 75 percent of the market, as I had seen reported, she replied: “Yes, that's what they say about us. It's a great responsibility.”)

But that figure has since been disputed by a rival, Federico Balestra, president of Sabatino Tartufi, who told me in an e-mail that his company is dominant in the United States, t he biggest truffle market. That, he said, makes it top dog. Since neither company publishes detailed sales data, the claims are hard to test.

Even the scientists who conducted the climate study I wrote about were hobbled by the dearth of solid market data, a fact bemoaned by Ulf Büntgen, the paleoclimatologist who led the project.

In the absence of a transparent, well-regulated truffle trade, it is perhaps not surprising that the black market fills the gaps. Bon Appetit magazine last month described a Greenwich Village chef who acknowledged having smuggled white truffles back from Italy. “The whole thing always feels like a drug deal, first of all,” the food magazine quoted the restaurateur, Frank Prisinzano, as saying. Chefs who don't know what they're doing, he added, “end up getting robbed a lot of the time.”

Meanwhile, scientists in France are seeking to clone the fungus, and French and Italian scientists have decoded its genetic code. Truffle growers in America and Australia are dreaming of cracking open the market.

A breakthrough in truffle cultivation would bring better supply and lower prices, and - as Ms. Urbani put it to me - “democratize” the fungus in the end, perhaps even making it just another supermarket commodity. If so, maybe some of the romance would be lost. Worth the price?