Fake Truffles, Real Underworld | Mushroom Foragers Host a Book Club

I. The “Diamond” of Gourmet Food

The truffle is a rare member of the Tuber genus, ranked alongside foie gras and caviar among the ‘three great delicacies’ of Western cuisine.

This fungus typically grows in symbiosis beneath pine, oak, hazel and other trees, and has extremely demanding requirements for its growing environment. At a white truffle fair in Italy, freshly shaved truffle slices fetch €3–4 per gram, while in the United States, truffles can sell for $3,000 per pound. In 2007, a 3.3-pound white truffle was purchased for $330,000 by a Macau casino tycoon.

One root of such extraordinary prices is the truffle’s unique and ineffable aroma. For the white truffle, the late food writer Josh Ozersky once offered this description: ‘A blend of freshly ploughed earth, autumn rain, earthworms tunnelling through the soil, and a fierce nostalgia for lost youth and a love long past.’

◉ At an auction, connoisseurs sniff a truffle. Image source: the documentary Truffle Hunters

Whether this is yet another tale spun by the luxury food industry or a genuinely profound experience on the palate, this global odyssey in search of the scent of truffles has captivated American food writer Rowan Jacobsen. He resolved to thoroughly “figure it out”.

This veteran food writer visited six countries and produced The Truffle Underground: A Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and Manipulation in the Shadowy Marketplace of the Truly Valuable Fungus. He witnessed the vast global supply chain behind truffles and its complex cast of players: the sharpest-nosed truffle hunters, major truffle companies (such as the “Urbani” family business with its global reach), well-connected local oligarchs who control forestry, farmers who abandoned coding for the soil, conscientious mycorrhiza biotechnology researchers, the organisers of dozens of bustling truffle festivals, and hounds of every breed, competing in championships amid the winter rain…

He also discovered that although the aroma is what truffles are most celebrated for, when buyers grade and price the most expensive white truffles, they assess only appearance — large size, no bite marks, and the ability to be shaved into thin slices. Scent has never been a factor.

◉ Brumar truffle. Image source: The Truffle Underground

◉ Rowan Jacobsen, author of The Truffle Underground, poses with a giant truffle weighing 1,143 grams at the National White Truffle Fair of Acqualagna. Image source: The Truffle Underground

By September, the wild mushroom season is drawing to a close and China’s truffles are entering their prime. This globally renowned food “diamond” has long been closely linked to China’s small-scale foragers and large-scale traders alike.

According to Jiemian News, total Chinese exports of fresh or chilled Tuber genus fungi (truffles) reached 32,486 kilograms (32.5 tonnes) in 2023 — more than the 20,486 kilograms recorded in 2022, and a historical high. Prices tell another story, however: Yunnan black truffle averaged $82 per kilogram, just one-ninth the price of French black truffle ($721 per kilogram). Overharvesting, declining quality and a tarnished international reputation have all weighed on Chinese truffle prices. After destructive extraction, Yunnan’s natural truffle yield once plummeted from 1,200 tonnes a year to around 250 tonnes — a fall of 80 per cent.

◉ In the documentary Truffle Hunters, elderly Italian truffle hunters and their beloved hounds. Image source: online streaming

Junjun is the convener of the Slow Harvest Network and a contributor to Foodthink, having long focused on the sustainable harvesting of wild fungi. He has learned that in recent years, as tariffs have risen, Chinese truffles have become exceptionally difficult to sell. One import–export trader told him that his cold-storage unit even held a decade-old stock of black truffles.

What determines whose truffles are deemed superior and command higher prices? And which companies drive and shape China’s black truffle exports?

The Truffle Underground touches on these very questions.

Chinese Truffles Used to Pass the Substandard Off as Premium

*This section is excerpted from Chapter 5, “A Game of Smoke and Mirrors”, of The Truffle Underground. With thanks to the publisher, Commercial Press, for granting permission.

The tragedy of the truffle is that the sensory thrill offered by this wondrous thing growing beneath the soil has been commodified into a symbol of luxury on the mass market. The truffle is always compared to a diamond, and I don’t think that is a coincidence: glittering diamonds, too, are hidden underground, so tightly bound to a price tag that the original thrill becomes almost irrelevant.

The De Beers (the South African monopoly diamond mining company founded in 1888) of the truffle industry is the Italian giant Urbani Tartufi, which controls roughly three-quarters of the global truffle market. At least, that is what Urbani Tartufi claims, and no other company is in a position to demand proof. Those in the truffle trade are not particularly diligent about keeping records.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Urbani family began buying truffles from local hunters in Umbria and exporting them to France, where domestic consumption had already outstripped what French truffle hunters could supply. At first, the trade was in fresh truffles, but Urbani Tartufi soon turned to tinned and bottled products to overcome the challenges of transport. The company expanded relentlessly, employing ever more buyers to purchase ever more truffles from hunters across Italy and France, and selling them worldwide. It even acquired Tartufi Morra, the Alba truffle company founded by Giacomo Morra.

Urbani Tartufi is now helmed by Olga Urbani, the great-great-granddaughter of the company’s founder, Constantine Urbani. To get a sense of Olga, one need only watch the television news programme 60 Minutes segment on the company. The report runs to twelve minutes, brimming with sycophantic praise of Olga and containing every rumour mentioned in this book, its dialogue sounding as though it were penned by Dr Seuss (the celebrated American children’s author and educator, winner of the Caldecott Medal and the Pulitzer Prize Special Award): “Traded like drugs! Stolen by villains!” Olga, with her deeply tanned skin, jet-black hair, luxurious fur coat and black leather gloves, stands on a truffle ground and talks non-stop. She appears as though she has walked straight off a film set — the Bond franchise’s latest instalment, playing the mastermind of SPECTRE. It is easy to see how Urbani Tartufi embodies the image most people conjure when they think of truffles: luxury, decadence, a bygone Europe and, above all, money.

Urbani Tartufi’s reputation as the SPECTRE of the truffle world was cemented in the 1990s, when two species of Chinese truffle — the Indian truffle (Tuber indicum) and the Himalayan truffle (Tuber himalayensis) — began appearing in international supply. These two Chinese species are mild in flavour. However, if blended into black winter truffles for transport, or into packaged products with added synthetic truffle oil, they are very difficult to tell apart. (The Himalayan truffle is almost indistinguishable from the black winter truffle in appearance; an experienced Italian truffle hunter told me to slice through the skin to check: beneath the skin, the black winter truffle reveals a thin layer of brown, whereas the Himalayan truffle is black all the way through.)

These two truffles are produced in the high-altitude regions of China’s Yunnan, Sichuan and Tibet. Once ripe, they carry a gentle aroma. In China they never attracted attention, but once the Chinese discovered their export value, they set about digging them up with frantic abandon, using rakes, hoes and ploughs instead of dogs. The truffles were far from ripe, but they travelled well, and that mattered more to the buyers. Unfortunately, this practice devastated the soil (sometimes to a depth of a foot), often destroying the very fungus that produces the truffles.

In the 1990s, Chinese truffles sold on the market for about $25 per kilogram — a mere fraction of the price of black winter truffles — and so, as many have observed, they were blended into black winter truffles. The profits were enormous, but this was illegal in Italy, which strictly prohibited the import of Chinese truffles.

For years, rumours persisted that Urbani Tartufi was involved in the Chinese truffle trade. In 1998, Italian police raided the company’s warehouse in Umbria and seized 47 tonnes of Chinese truffles, confirming the rumours.

Forty-seven tonnes! Let that sink in. France, the spiritual home of the black winter truffle, produces fewer than 30 tonnes in total each year. And a routine search turned up 47 tonnes of black winter truffle substitutes in Urbani Tartufi’s warehouse.

According to testimony, Urbani Tartufi initially blended Chinese truffles into black winter truffles at a ratio of three to seven, but then it grew greedier and sloppier, much like the plot of Goodfellas (the 1990 American biographical crime drama based on real events, chronicling the thirty-odd years of legendary exploits of gangster Henry Hill and portraying the distinctive lifestyle and values of mob figures). The company paid a hefty fine, but everyone escaped prison — until 2001, when they were found guilty of evading millions in taxes. Even then, Olga’s father, Paolo, was nothing more than a man clanking around his mansion in ankle shackles for a spell.

In fairness, since 2001, Urbani Tartufi has been playing by the rules. It has promoted truffles across the world, giving more and more people the chance to enjoy them. There is nothing wrong with that. It is just that the business is enormous. The unfortunate truth is that once your product — be it caviar or cornflakes — becomes big business, it becomes the company’s token little product, and all you can think about is how to make that little product even more profitable.

If any food could resist this trend, it would surely be the truffle; every single truffle represents a moment of grace between a truffle hunter and his hound. These intensely fragrant little orbs — their provenance and authenticity should be integral to what makes them unique. Yet because the white truffle is a wild food, hunted in secret and traditionally sold through informal networks, the story behind the scenes has always been as murky as that of someone in a witness protection programme. Truffles simply appear at the back doors of restaurant kitchens, handled by big companies, small companies and anyone who happens to be in the middle. Somehow, the farm-to-table revolution has transformed virtually every aspect of cooking and food, yet truffles have somehow been bypassed. Between the Carlo Marendas of this world and the restaurants and fairs where these truffles surface, there is an enormous black box.

To my mind, that is odd. A chef who can spot a substandard sea urchin from twenty metres away, truly fooled by a fake or second-rate truffle? I don’t know. I have never been involved in the truffle trade.

……

◉ Since 2025, Huidong County in Sichuan’s Liangshan Prefecture has also been experimenting with cultivated truffles: villagers first inoculate tree roots with truffle mycelium, then transplant the saplings to a cultivation site. Image source: Cover News

No Truffle in Truffle Oil

The book also contains other little-known facts that bear directly on consumers, such as:

There is no truffle in truffle oil — just olive oil laced with a synthetic chemical called 2,4-dithiapentane. Chefs are easily taken in; “they rarely have the chance to know their ingredients the way those who sell them do”. (Chapter 5, “A Game of Smoke and Mirrors”)

“Any truffle loses the bulk of its precious aroma in the canning process. That smell is supplied by 2,4-dithiapentane and other chemicals, which is precisely what most consumers want — just as they prefer artificial strawberry flavouring to the taste of a real strawberry. So there is no need to use any real truffle to make your product meet customer expectations.”

◉ In everyday truffle products such as black truffle fries and black truffle butter, the aroma comes from chemicals, not from the truffles themselves. Image source: Huitu

Most truffles are simply frozen or tinned, with only a handful of premium specimens sold fresh at high prices. Here we are talking about the black summer truffle, not the more intensely aromatic and costlier black winter truffle. The black summer truffle, produced in such abundance (the author likens it to dirt in its commonness), has become the darling of the big truffle companies. It is what replaced Chinese truffles in the Italian market. With mass dumping from countries such as Iran and Bulgaria, its price has plunged from €200 per kilogram to €30–40. (Chapter 6, “The Big Truffle Companies”)

◉ Black summer truffle. Image source: The Truffle Underground

As for the black winter truffle, Spain and France are its principal producing regions, and the farmers there are battling drought with everything they have.

Hungary is another major producing region for black winter truffles, where the hunt for truffles once spawned a “tragedy of the commons”. In Romania, Bulgaria, Iran, China, and Oregon in the United States, destructive methods of harvesting black truffles have all appeared — people raking back the topsoil to extract truffles near the surface, rather than training truffle hounds. Such harvesting tears through tree roots and mycelium. (Chapter 12, “The Order of Truffle Knights of St Laszlo”)

◉ In the documentary The Truffle Hunters, a retired Italian truffle hunter speaks of the greed within the truffle industry, specifically mentioning the poisoning of hounds. Image source: streaming platform

Others are carefully cultivating “truffle farms”, such as the Blackberry Farm in Tennessee that the author visits in the book. Many have enjoyed brief, luminous flashes of success, yet now, after a tree disease, hundreds of hazelnut truffle plantations are barely producing at all. (Chapter 15, “The Winter Men”)

◉ Burwell Farm in North Carolina — the first in the United States to produce white truffles at scale, covering ten acres (approximately 400 hectares) — told the Wall Street Journal that dozens of dogs are poisoned every year. Image source: The Wall Street Journal

Next Tuesday (29 September), Foodthink, in collaboration with the Slow Harvest Network, will invite Professor Yu Fuqiang, a senior engineer at the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Kang Li, a Yi returnee farmer from China’s truffle-growing heartlands, to hold a book talk on The Truffle Underground, discussing how the harvesting, flavour, and culture of Chinese truffles have been affected by climate change in recent years, and how the circumstances of small-scale foragers have shifted.

– Event Preview –

The Truffle Underground Book Talk

Tuesday, 29 September

19:00-20:30

Online livestream, free to join

To ask a question of our guests, please scan the QR code below

– Guest Profiles –

Yu Fuqiang | Senior engineer at the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, with deep expertise in the conservation and utilisation of macromycete resources. He has broken through the key technologies for cultivated truffle production and is rooted in the mountainous regions of southwest China, promoting the cultivation of rare edible fungi to empower the efficient use of biological resources and rural livelihood development. He has been named an Advanced Individual of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Kang Li | A Yi woman from China’s truffle-growing heartlands. After graduating from senior high school, she joined rural reconstruction work in Kunming and Beijing. At the end of 2015 she decided to root her life in the countryside, returning to Chuxiong in Yunnan to start her own business. She went on to launch two platforms — Kangli Local Goods and Happy Homestead — using sales to support local sustainable harvesting and cultural preservation.

Junjun | Convener of the Slow Harvest Network, who entered the wild-fungi trade by working off the books for a truffle boss. He has long focused on the sustainable harvesting of wild fungi. (WeChat ID: mancaiwangluo)

– Book Information –

The Truffle Underground: The Science, Culture and Secrets Behind the World’s Premier Ingredient

Food writer Rowan Jacobsen travels across six countries, following larger-than-life truffle hunters and their beloved hounds through the undergrowth in search of treasure, unearthing these diamond-grade delicacies from beneath an unremarkable carpet of fallen leaves. From Italy, France, Spain and Croatia to Hungary and the United States — from truffle hunts that feel like expeditions through dark forests at night, to truffle fairs as clamorous and hard to navigate as souvenir markets, to the buying yards where sellers and purchasers schemed against each other… Through these earthy journeys the author also unravels the science behind truffle growth and reaches the very heart of the truffle industry, exposing the profit games and tangled alliances lurking beneath.

About the Author

Rowan Jacobsen won the James Beard Award — the food world’s Oscars — for A Geography of Oysters. He is also the author of American Terroir, Apples of Uncommon Character and several other books. A regular contributor to The New York Times, Outside, Food & Wine, Orion and other magazines, he has appeared on numerous food television programmes and has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other publications.

About the Translator

Zhang Jie, from Songjiang, Shanghai, holds a BA in history from Fudan University and an MA in law (international relations) from the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University. She currently works at Fudan University. Her translations include A Few Planes for China: The Birth of the Flying Tigers, Walking Lemons: A Journey Through Italian Orange Groves, and The Warp and Weft of Civilisation: How Textiles Shaped the World.

– Contents –

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1 Down the Rabbit Hole

2 Aphrodisiac Black Magic

3 The Alba Truffle Trade

4 Truffles You Can’t Forget

5 A Game of Smoke and Mirrors

6 The Big Truffle Companies

7 Truffle Town

8 Crescent Moon

9 Black Autumn Truffle

10 The Big Shots