If we are what we eat, then we best not let our voracious appetites devour our better values.ĪARON SHULMAN: Since I’m always interested in how the sausage gets made - or perhaps more aptly, in this case, how the truffle gets to the plate - can you tell me how your magazine article for The Atlantic about the underworld of truffles became a book? While he exposes the underbelly of the truffle industry, he reminds us that consumers themselves drive it. In the guise of a crisply written and engaging story about a rare, astronomically priced delicacy, Jacobs has produced a contemporary morality tale about capitalism and consumerism. The Truffle Underground is as much about human nature as it is about a little-known corner of the food industry. As Jacobs puts it, “omewhere, above, another underground awaits.” In other words, while something special happens underground to create the unique, earthy flavors of the truffle, it never, metaphorically, escapes its origins. Among other things, we learn about daring truffle heists, truffle-related murders, truffle dog poisonings, and rank corporate truffle malfeasance. (That said, he does include several drool-inducing scenes in the book.) Through deep reporting, he builds his story from the ground up, interviewing everyone from working-class truffle hunters in damp Italian forests, to eccentric scientists in the United States seeking to understand vexing fungal secrets, to truffle moguls in gleaming tasting rooms who are selling a story as much as a product (and often not even the product they claim to be selling). Jacobs is a longtime crime reporter and currently an editor at Pacific Standard, so his dive into the world of truffles isn’t of the food-porn photo-spread variety. HOW DO FUNGI resembling “the strange, mangled droppings of a forest troll” pull in auction prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and what are the effects of such frenzied competition on the people who work in the industry that harvests and distributes them? This is the question at the heart of journalist Ryan Jacobs’s first book, The Truffle Underground: A Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and Manipulation in the Shadowy Market of the World’s Most Expensive Fungus.
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