Truffle Scuffle

By Hannah Beech/Shanghai

The locals of Hama Village know what to do with a fat, smelly truffle. For centuries, if the village pigs in this remote corner of China's Yunnan province were acting a little less amorous than normal, the farmers fed a shovelful of truffles to the creatures in order to guarantee a future litter of piglets. Then, a few years ago, a strange tale wended its way through this hamlet, so disconnected from modern China that Cultural Revolution slogans from three decades ago are still inscribed on the village's mud-brick walls: foreigners, for some mysterious reason, were willing to pay exorbitant prices for what the locals dismissively call "pig snout" fungi. "When we first asked the people in the countryside whether they had any truffles, they were shocked we wanted to buy them," recalls Wu Jianming, chairman of Kunming Rare Truffle Co., the province's largest truffle exporter. "An hour later, they brought us a whole bagful and still couldn't believe that foreigners wanted to eat what they usually fed to their pigs."

China is the world's biggest exporter of fake goods, from pirated DVDs to knock-off Birkin bags. Add truffles to the list. To the naked eye, the Chinese black truffle, or Tuber indicum, looks virtually indistinguishable from its much vaunted European cousin, Tuber melanosporum, a gastronomic delicacy that perks up winter menus with its earthy pungency. One taste, though, clears up any confusion. The Chinese variety is insipid when compared with the one found in France, Italy and Spain. Yet over the past few years, unscrupulous dealers in Europe and the U.S. have begun passing off the Chinese truffles as Umbrian or Perigord black diamonds. The deception has roiled the luxury-food industry, particularly as European harvests have dwindled. Last season, when a heat wave cut the Perigord bounty from the usual 50 tons to 9, the import of Chinese truffles skyrocketed to an estimated 30 tons, from 20 the year before. This season the U.S. is facing its own Chinese-truffle deluge. A strong euro has sent the price of French-truffle imports up 30%, to $1,800 per kg wholesale, in the past year, leading some restaurants and gourmet-store owners to substitute Eastern truffles for Perigords. Purists are outraged. "You can't compare the two," sniffs Guy Monier, who sells French truffles for $2,300 per kg at his Paris shop and has seen the Chinese fungus masquerading as the French variety in nearby supermarkets. "The Chinese import is just a flavorless, rubbery black ball." In Italy it's illegal to import or sell the Tuber indicum, although that protective barrier may not last. "With Italy in the E.U., sooner or later the law will be the same for everyone," says Bruno Urbani, a director of Urbani Tartufi, an Umbria-based firm that is the largest exporter of truffles in the world.

Kunming Rare Truffle Co.'s Wu cheerfully admits that some of his clients mix his fungi with European ones. But the former metallurgist is astounded less by the chicanery than by the prices his truffles can command abroad. What Wu sells to wholesalers for $80 per kg can be resold to Westerners for 30 times that, or more than double the average yearly income in China. "Who would pay that much for a mushroom?" Wu marvels. "Is it because they think it's an aphrodisiac?" (Since medieval times, many have believed just that.) Nevertheless, Wu maintains a modicum of pride about the 40 to 50 tons of truffles that his team of 20,000 gatherers harvests for him each year. "They taste just as good as the French ones, with maybe a little less aroma," he contends--although he concedes that he's never actually tasted a Perigord truffle.

Don't tell that to Guy Cubaynes, a truffle harvester from the southern French town of Lalbenque, who is taking his 250-kg pig Kiki out for a truffle hunt. Cubaynes' family has been gathering truffles since the 1850s, searching for the fungi in the shade of oak trees. He says dealers in Chinese truffles have even infiltrated the center of French-truffle production. Every week, Cubaynes claims, these merchants show up at the market in Lalbenque with the same number of truffles in their baskets, a suspicious constancy. "It's cheating the consumer," says Cubaynes, "and it's also cheating the honest worker."

France is counting on modern science to catch the impostors. The National Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA) has developed a type of DNA analysis to distinguish French fungi from Chinese without a taste test. Although French regulations call for a truffle's origins to be clearly marked, truffle experts say many vendors either ignore the rules or engage in outright mislabeling. France's fraud-control directorate carries out random DNA testing to flush out faux-truffle dealers. Anyone caught intending to deceive the consumer with a Chinese truffle may be fined $1,300. Still, there are few inspectors and many truffles. "If the consumer is properly informed that they are eating a Chinese truffle, there is no problem," says Michel Courvoisier, director of the French Federation of Truffle Growers. "But when a shop or restaurateur uses one in place of the other, the consumer is ripped off. I suspect this happens a lot."

There's more to worry the truffle old school. "We saw in experiments that Tuber indicum is very dominant, competitive and aggressive," frets Gerard Chevalier, a researcher at INRA. He paints a scenario in which errant spores from imported Chinese truffles disperse into the air, contaminate the European countryside and beat the fungi out of their more fragile cousins. Already the ancient truffle terroir is being hammered by pesticides and urbanization. Two centuries ago, French black truffles were so abundant that they were cheaper than tomatoes; since then, the average annual truffle harvest in the Perigord region and beyond has declined, from some 1,800 tons to a mere 50 tons. An influx of Chinese truffle spores could finish off an already threatened gastronomic tradition.

Back in China, though, Wu sees nothing but mycological possibility. In the past year, he has begun exporting his own truffle oil and is starting a canned--foie gras business using geese imported from Hungary. Now he's attempting to duplicate the soil and climate of southern France in his Yunnan fields. If he can create the correct environmental conditions, Wu believes Yunnan's plentiful land and low fixed costs will make him even more of a threat to the European truffle tradition. "Labor is very cheap here," Wu says. "In France they use pigs and dogs to find truffles. We can use humans."

None of that, however, changes one irksome fact that has limited Wu's business. The Chinese so far appear immune to the pleasures of the black truffle. Mushroom gatherer Li Kun shakes his head when asked whether he enjoys the flavor of the black nuggets he's scooping up. "When we're really hungry, we eat them covered with soy sauce, coriander, chili paste and MSG," he says. "That way you don't have to taste the truffle too much, only the sauce." Sacrilege. --With reporting by Bu Hua/Hama, Mimi Murphy/Rome and Jonathan Shenfield/Lalbenque

With reporting by Bu Hua/Hama, Mimi Murphy/Rome, Jonathan Shenfield/Lalbenque