In “The Truffle Underground,” author Ryan Jacobs investigates how fake truffles have flooded the Italian food scene
White truffles (also known as Piedmont or Alba truffles) are one of the world’s most prized culinary delicacies: When shaved atop a dish, they add a pleasantly earthy layer along with their unexpectedly fresh texture. Often, their presence — thanks to their famously high price tag — is more a status symbol, a signal of the procurer’s appreciation of the finer things in life, regardless of the cost. And perhaps not surprisingly, as with many other luxury symbols, thieves, saboteurs, and fraudsters operate an underground market that looks to cut corners wherever possible.In The Truffle Underground, Pacific Standard deputy editor Ryan Jacobs heads to Europe to suss out the secretive under-the-table economies fueling the illegal truffle trade, from the petty thieves literally digging through truffle farms to the sophisticated operations that smuggle inferior truffles across international borders. In the following excerpt, from the book’s “Detectives and Fraudsters” section, Jacobs embeds with members of Italy’s forestry corps and NAS, the Italian carabinieri’s food and health crime division, for an inside look at truffle true crime. — Erin DeJesus
Roberta Ubaldo, an officer in the State Forestry Corps, reported to the organization’s gated beige compound on the edge of downtown Asti, Italy, in 2012, the memo had already arrived from Rome. The top commanders had ordered an investigation to ensure that sellers at agricultural fairs across Italy were adhering to financial requirements governing the purchase and sale of foraged goods. In Piedmont’s Asti province, officers quickly focused on checking middlemen’s declared purchases against the quantities of truffles they were trying to sell.Early in the investigation, Diego Grizi, one of Ubaldo’s colleagues, approached several truffle traders in plain clothes at the main truffle fair in Asti, posing as an interested buyer. During the course of his rounds, he noticed one man who had not set out tags listing the origin of the Piedmont white truffles he was selling. Though prepared by the sellers themselves, the origin tags introduce at least some degree of accountability to the process, because they can be checked against dealers’ purchasing paperwork.Grizi, an athletic man with dark eyes, short-cropped hair, and a stubble beard, asked the trader for some kind of confirmation that the truffles were really from Asti’s foothills. He didn’t have any.“Who are you?” the trader asked. “What do you want from me?”Grizi and his partner identified themselves as investigators with the Forestry Corps and asked him for the “self-invoices” he was required to prepare on behalf of the truffle hunters he purchased from. The Italian system makes it the responsibility of the middleman, as the buyer, to document the Latin scientific name of the truffle species, the corresponding Italian name, the location of origin, and the quantity purchased from truffle hunters.The man fidgeted, covered up his truffles, and hurriedly packed them into a bag. As he was preparing to leave, Grizi asked for the documentation again. The trader shoved one of Grizi’s colleagues out of the way and sprinted down the street. Grizi and other corps officers pursued him on foot through the streets of Asti.Panting, they ran after him for about a mile. Before they could catch up, he hopped into a car and escaped.
Back at the corps’s offices, what began as a check to ensure adherence to basic administrative rules quickly developed into a full-scale fraud investigation. Officers interviewed witnesses. They tracked paperwork. They examined the activities of at least 100 different companies. Finally, after months of investigation, Ubaldo and the rest of her team found that roughly 75 percent of the white Piedmont truffles moving across the Asti market originated in Italian regions far away from the famed territory, including the central region of Umbria and the southern region of Molise. As soon as the truffles arrived on the tables of the Asti middlemen, though, they “became” truffles from Piedmont. They remained that way, of course, until they reached dining rooms.Roughly 15 percent of the Piedmont whites in Asti didn’t even originate within Italy’s borders: Traders bought them from hunters working on Croatia’s Istrian Peninsula. Altogether, more than 90 percent of the truffles didn’t come from Alba’s famous soil, making wholesale prices among suppliers much cheaper than what hunters working the local hills would have accepted, and the profit margins for dealers much steeper.Many traders in Asti knew the international value of the Asti, Alba, and Piedmont names, and for years they had capitalized on it by selling the same species from less renowned regions and countries. “Do the math,” Ken Frank, an American chef who runs La Toque in Napa and has been working with truffles since the 1970s, said flatly. “They can’t all buy truffles from Alba.”All this investigation of small-time truffle dealers might seem like a lark, but European food fraud is a quickly expanding phenomenon, often linked to the interests of organized crime. NAS, the carabinieri’s food and health crime division, investigates food fraud the way the FBI investigates terrorism. In 38 different offices throughout Italy, with more than a thousand officers, the organization works tirelessly to catch fraudsters and remove counterfeit food from the shelves. They often receive approval for full-scale surveillance operations: They tail suspects with cameras, track trucking routes with GPS devices, plant bugs, and monitor email wiretaps. When they raid warehouses and manufacturing facilities, they carry guns....
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