A well-known theory says that all the living beings take up a certain action only if they profit from it. Therefore, we should raise two questions which are not easy to be answered: why do we eat truffles and why do truffles make themselves eaten? Let’s start to find an answer to the first question. In brief, we could say that we do credit truffles during our meals because we enjoy them.

A nutritionist would probably agree: we won’t certainly choose the rare tuber as a food source because of the few grams of proteins, fats, glucides and minerals we pay a fortune for.

A sociologist would make better cases for it: people order truffles at the restaurant, eat them at home with friends, or give them as a present because such a gesture shows their economic and cultural status; it provides satisfaction by allowing the consumers with something rare and sought-after. An economist, however, could object that this makes sense only if we consider the value of truffles as deriving from the ratio of supply (quite scarce) to demand (very high in many industrialized countries).

Therefore, we should get back to our roots to understand the sensory “spring” which made the universal craving for truffles jump. The solution to the problem lies in the second question: why does the tuber make itself eaten?
Try to imagine that ordered pile of cells twined round themselves which lives in the dark grasping at the roots of a tree to which it gives precious minerals in order to get glucides, i.e. its main energy source, in exchange. How can it comply with the primary rule of the world of living beings - innate in each genetic stock - which orders an individual the species preservation and evolution?

Men and women can turn neither to the beauty of flowers nor to the evident aroma of fruits…and here comes the most powerful and superb sophistication: the emission of molecules capable of spreading in the ground or coming to the surface, being perceived by other living beings – by dogs and pigs in an almost subliminal way – and somehow upsetting their mind since they are closely related to those stimulating sexual instinct!

The complex aroma of truffles hides a chemical code capable of being neglected by the rational part of our brain, and ending up directly in the limbic system which governs our emotions and feelings - the invitation to life itself! If you please!
Human beings, even though they have lost part of the olfactory sensitiveness which is typical of other mammals, are even then ensnared by the emissions of truffles, and they learn to enjoy a scent, all in all very elegant, through a signal which is not perceived consciously but capable of being a hub of “fatal attraction”.

 

Culinary use of truffles