Truffles are one of those ingredients that every self-professed foodie idealizes past any sense of proportion. You never forget the first time that you smell them in the dining room, the way that the perfume of simultaneous fecundity and decay wafts through a whole section of tables and everyone's head turns toward the table that is luxuriating in that uber-mushroom aroma. The only other foodstuff with a smell of similar transfixing power is a big, old bottle of red wine. Much like big, old bottles of red wine, truffles have become fetish objects in our culture, and much like big, old bottles of red wine, the quality of the truffle bears tangential at best relation to its final cost to a diner.
As recently as last week, the wild white truffles harvested around the town of Alba in northern Italy were selling for just under $5000/lb. Wholesale. Let's unpack this, because it's more than a little mind-boggling that anything that one eats could possibly be so expensive. There are enormous legitimate costs intrinsic to the harvesting of truffles. First, a trufflehunter must either train a dog to seek out the mushroom spores, which grow underground at the bases of certain trees (not just certain types of trees, mind you, certain individual trees) or use a sow, who will be relentlessly attracted to the smell of the truffle because it contains pheromones similar to those found in the saliva of her mate but will also attempt to eat the truffle once she has unearthed it. So spend weeks training a dog or trust in your ability to corral the appetite of a horny hog. Cost #1. Second, as noted, the truffles are only found in the forests surrounding a small town in northern Italy. Even if your well-trained dog or unstoppable sexed-up pig find all the truffles they possibly can, there are only so many out there, and plenty of other trufflehunters looking for the lucrative little bastards. Also, the harvesting season lasts only a few weeks, so it's not like you can show up in May and hope that no one else with a dog or pig is out that day. Cost #2. Third, once unearthed, the truffles begin to decay almost immediately. As with most non-green vegetables, they have a relatively long shelf life, but it's still imperative to get them to market as quickly as possible. Cost #3. Finally, and again as noted before, the white truffles found around Alba are sought out by discerning gourmands the world over, so there are enormous costs related to transport and storage, because even if you can keep your swine from devouring the precious tuber the moment she finds it, she is unlikely to show such restraint during a Trans-Atlantic voyage. Adding to these costs is the fact, to reiterate, that the white truffles found around Alba are in demand across the world. There are only so many truffles in the world and anyone who has been near their enchanting smell can attest what a special treat it is. Scatter enough truffle enthusiasts around the globe and eventually their testimonials increase worldwide demand for this native food, with its inherently limited supply. Limited supply and unlimited demand will always equal outrageous price.
There really is no reason this should be, however. Despite the fact that truffles will not grow at the base of every single sycamore or cypress tree, a sycamore or cypress (or pecan or red maple or whatever) that has produced truffle spores in the past will 1) continue to produce them for a good 30 years and 2) yield nuts or saplings that predictably attract the truffles spores on down through the generations. In other words, the cultivation of truffles would be relatively easy. Of course, ease of cultivation would increase supply and therefore cause the price of white Alba truffles to decrease. Guess how the people who currently make their living hunting/harvesting/distributing/serving white Alba truffles feel about the idea of increasing the supply on the market. A bigger and maybe more important reason that the price of white Alba truffles need not be so outrageous is: they are actually not as rich aromatically or as complex in flavor as their less rarefied (though still plenty expensive) cousins, the black truffle. To beat a dead horse, wild white Alba truffles are found by either well-trained dogs or desperate housewife hogs during a brief period of time in a tiny area of northern Italy, and therefore are rare. Black truffles are more easily and widely cultivated, they keep longer and lose less flavor if they are dried and their harvest season is longer. Once I went to the Museum of Natural History and spent a while in the room with all the gemstones. To my mind, the sapphires were the prettiest and the opals the most interesting. But, of course, the diamonds get the best placement within the room and fetch the highest prices in the jewelers (and in the world of natural history museums, no doubt), but for only one reason that I can discern: they are rarer. So, too, with white truffles. The scent that they blast out in a dining room is unmistakeable and unique, but it is not necessarily that elegant or even appetizing. Where black truffles smell of rich earth with a hint of pepper, white truffles always smell like money congratulating its own existence to me.
Tartuffe, the titular villain of Moliere's most controversial comedy, is a well-perfumed dandy and charlatan who masquerades as a pious holy man in order to relieve the aged and wealthy Orgon of as much of his fortune as possible before the old man dies. Tartuffe has convinced Orgon that it is only with his (Tartuffe's) sage advice that Orgon will stave off ruination and death. By casting himself as the sole supply of that which Orgon most demands (like all of us, Orgon is fixated on not being a dead homeless person), Tartuffe is able to very nearly beggar the old man before the inevitable comic reversal by which Orgon's fortune is saved and Tartuffe's ragamuffinry is exposed.
Hopefully without coming across as too hoity-toity, I will confess that I am deeply suspicious of direct democracy and the capacity of the people to govern themselves. My home state of California provides an object lesson in the dangers of allowing those citizens who have a great interest in the outcomes of governmental action but very little interest in the work (another word for compromise) by which those outcomes are achieved to take control of public policy. Hence California has an incredible system of state universities and parks and prisons (people love schools and nature and hate criminals) but insufficient revenue to actually pay for their operations (people hate taxes even more than criminals). In California, everyone is Orgon, susceptible to the suggestions of Tartuffe, who may take the guise of an environmental lobbying firm or an anti-immigration group but whose underlying message is always "make this decision that I am suggesting that perfectly aligns with your worldview and all will be well." Of course, Orgon is only attractive to Tartuffe because he is such an easy target. Were Orgon hale or less wealthy, there would be no Tartuffe. If Californians were better educated or possessed fewer exploitable natural resources, they might well be more capable of governing themselves well, without the interventions of the various Tartuffes.
Transforming a preference into a fetish requires a psychological leap that is both entirely understandable and clearly defiant of basic logic. To wit: pesto is a food that makes me happy; therefore I will only order pesto when I eat in Italian restaurants, in order that I might find the one that has the finest pesto, so that I can find out where their purveyors source the basil and pine nuts and cheese that composes this pesto, and then I will buy up those farms and brush my pesto-stained teeth with pesto after a long day at the pesto dispensary before I turn in and sleep in my pesto-filled waterbed next to my wife who is constantly scented with pesto perfume. Even my pesto dream makes more sense than the suckers who blow all that cash on white truffles, though. Lots of people like pesto, after all. I could finance my pestotopia by selling whatever excess pesto there was to the masses. White truffles are kept at artificially high prices by people with a vested interest in doing so who are enabled by a class of people who consider themselves to be successful and blessed with good taste simply because they have the means to afford a delicacy so rarefied and refined that the only other creatures who seek it out are, again, trained dogs or sows in heat.
True good taste is defined by questions like: What am I hungry for? Where is the best place to satiate my hunger for that thing? Can I perhaps supply it myself or via the help of friends/neighbors/family? My preference for republican (note the small r) governance rather than democratic lies not in my belief that people are fundamentally incapable of making decisions on their own behalf. Indeed, I am friends almost exclusively with people who know what they want, how to get it, and how best to engage the other interested members of their community in those same issues. Rather, it is my continued observation of masses of people who allow themselves to be deluded into thinking that white truffles are worth more than basically any other legal substance despite the fact that they will shit it out within the day or that 3 Strikes and You're Out is good public policy despite no discernible decrease in felony rates and the bankrupting of the state prison system that makes me suspicious of granting further power to the people. Maybe I would feel differently if our citizens were better educated, but that would probably require additional tax money.
Oh, and in case it wasn't already clear, tartuffe is French for truffle.
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