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?

Adding More Bricks to the Great Firewall of China

HONG KONG - China appears to have reinforced its Internet firewall in recent days, blocking some of the leading services that allow people on the mainland to access forbidden sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

International business transactions also are being affected, Internet analysts said. The Chinese-language edition of The New York Times remains 100 percent blocked.

At least three foreign companies - Astrill, WiTopia and StrongVPN - have apologized to customers whose virtual private networks, or VPNs, have been slowed or disabled. VPNs are used to circumvent the Communist government's firewall. The companies, meanwhile, were suggesting some work-arounds.

The daily newspaper Global Times, affiliated with the Comm unist Party, acknowledged the firewall had been “upgraded,” but it also warned that foreign providers of VPN services were operating illegally.

China blocks online searches of politically sensitive terms, smothers embarrassing news events, blocks online messages from dissidents and simply deletes any microblog posts that it dislikes.

The firewall also blocks countless Web sites that are openly available to users elsewhere around the world - from pornography sites and commercial come-ons to news reporting, political activism and religious proselytizing. Users on the mainland thus have to use VPNs to reach the banned sites.

Liu Xiao Ming, the Chinese ambassador to Britain, told the BBC on Friday that there was “a misconception about the Internet and development in China.”

“In fact, the Chinese are very much open in terms of the Internet,” he said, quoted in an article in The South China Morning Post. “In fact, we have the most number of Internet users in China today.”

An estimated 600 million Chinese have access to the Internet.

Foreign businesses also use VPNs not only to safeguard their transactions but also to keep government censors and rival companies from seeing their corporate communications.

Global Times quoted an anonymous executive at a foreign technology company operating in China who said the lack of a VPN would damage the firm's operations.

Josh Ong, China editor of the tech monitoring site The Next Web, said in an interview with the Voice of America that international companies were reporting disruptions in their corporate VPN services.

“A lot of companies have a general policy that they must use their own proxy network in order to transfer data, especially into and out of China,” Mr. Ong said. “So you are looking at banks or e-commerce companies, anyone who is transferring very sensitive information, a lot of them use corporate VPNs.”

Mr. Ong suggested that the tightening of the firewall could be tied to the recent leadership change in the Chinese Communist Party.

“It is certainly possible that some of it is just a general flexing of might, kind of coming in with a strong arm to really show who's in control,” he said. “But there is definitely something intentional happening when these VPN services are being restricted.”

As Bill Bishop wrote recently on DealBook, China's management of the Internet “has not been encouraging for those who want to believe the leadership will push reforms.”

“I have lived in Beijing since 2005, and these have been the most draconian few days of Internet restrictions I have experienced,” he said last month.

“Indiscriminate blocking of major parts of the global Internet is not going to help China in its quest to internationalize the renminbi and make it a reserve currency,” Bill said. “Internet controls at the level of the last few days may also deter foreign firms from moving their regional headquarters to China.”

Barbara Demick of The Los Angeles Times bureau in Beijing offered this cautionary tweet:

My colleagues Sharon LaFraniere and David Barboza wrote about similar concerns over China's Internet censorship last year, and they spoke to Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China, an investment and strategy consultancy based in Beijing.

“It has been double the guard, and double the guard, and you never hear proclamations about things being relaxed,” said Mr. Clark, a 17-ye ar resident of China. “We have never seen this level of control in the time I have been here, and I have been here since the beginning of the Internet.”

Home for the Holidays, or Not: An Expat Christmas in New York

NEW YORK - I am American and I live abroad right here in New York. I know it doesn't seem to make sense but it is true. Well that's because I am French-American to be precise. I've lived and worked in New York for almost twenty years and I call it home - except at Christmas time.

I love the days leading to Christmas in New York with the gorgeous light displays, the creative store windows, the Christmas music blaring in and out of stores, the thoughtful gifts from colleagues wrapped in reindeer- or snowmen-printed paper and the jolly end of year potluck parties.

But come Dec. 24, while I look at the colorful Christmas card display from my fellow American friends neatly hanging on a string above my fireplace, the words JOY and MERRY written on all of them make me sad and homesick.

My family is in France and on Christmas Eve, they will be celebrating Christmas without me.

Before my two children were born, I would always go back to France for the holida ys. But now fares for a family of four at Christmastime are so expensive that I must make the choice to save our trip for a longer visit to France in the summer. Every year, I check the fares almost daily like we check the weather forecast.

But also every year, I am thankful for the numerous French stores in New York, especially French pastry and chocolate boutiques, for giving me consolation with a delightful taste of France.

The “bûche de Noël,” the cream filled Christmas log, is a must in my house at Christmas. And so is good company to share the bûche with.

Since I don't have the opportunity of sharing it with my family - I will compare pictures of our respective bûches via Skype though - I invite dear friends who find themselves in the same predicament as me, far from their families at Christmas. Some are from Belgium, others as f ar away as Australia.

This year, my husband, children and I will be celebrating Christmas in Brooklyn with very dear friends: a Canadian and three Italians. In a way, although we will be eating a delightful homemade Italian meal and a delicious French bûche, we will be celebrating Christmas with an American spirit of cultural diversity. That's heartwarming.

Joyeux Noël!

Where in the world are you spending your holidays? Are you a student abroad? Are you an expat in a country whose customs are not your own? Tell us your stories in the comment section below.