The Truffle Underground

Hi. I don't really like truffles. I'm not a fan of their smell, their taste, or their price tag. But this book made me wonder if maybe I just haven't had an actual truffle. How would I know? I'm just some rube in the United States. I've never gone truffle hunting, steeped myself in truffle culture, or created an entire business empire based around it. I'm also not shady, underhanded, or an evil person who poisons other truffle hunters' dogs, so maybe I just wouldn't cut it anyway.

This book was incredibly interesting, even for someone who's not a fan of truffles. I learned so much about this humble fungus that I never really would have guessed. For instance, we're still not really sure how or why truffles form. I sort of figured everything consumable was already studied, broken down, and science'd into efficiency by now, but that was a thing I learned. There's tons of other little factoids and history topics covered in this book about truffles, and handled in an interesting way. Each chapter covers another aspect of the shady culture surrounding truffles. Thanks to incredibly high profit margins, everyone from the truffle hunter to the company selling the truffles directly to restaurants has participated in underhanded dealings to get ahead of their competitors in the truffle market. Sneaking onto someone else's land in the middle of the night, poisoning or stealing the dogs from other truffle hunters, accidental (or intentional) murders, and smash-and-grab style robberies are all on the table when it comes to getting a truffle to your plate. It's really quite fascinating.

I loved how the author dovetails each chapter into the next, where we start out with truffle history, which then passes to truffle stealing, and on and on in escalation until we get to corporate espionage, deliberately misleading/incorrect product packaging, and overall profit greed. The author's way of describing his experiences with the people he met and places he visited was also incredibly engaging for me. It seems you have to be a certain kind of obsessive, slightly off individual to be a truffle hunter.

Overall a very interesting book about a niche topic, my favorite kind of book.