The real crimes of trade in luxury fungi | Economic Times

Nicholas Cage is known for his wide and weird range of film roles. And one of his oddest ones is in his latest film, simply titled Pig. Cage plays a chef turned hermit who has retreated to the forests of the Pacific Northwest to make a living hunting truffles with the help of a pig. But the underground fungi are so valuable that this is now a cut-throat business and Cage’s pig is kidnapped, forcing him to leave his refuge in pursuit.If such a film was ever made in Goa it could be titled Termite. Just as pigs help locate truffles, Goa’s roen olmi mushrooms are located when they come up with the first rains on the earthen nests built up by termites, with which they seem to have a symbiotic relationship. And just as greed is devastating the truffle trade, roen olmi are now endangered by unrestrained harvesting coupled with destruction of termite hills by land development.Foraging for mushrooms has a romantic image, of close engagement with the natural world which produces these unpredictable edibles. And the involvement of animals, like termites or the pigs and dogs used by truffle hunters adds another level of connection. It has been celebrated in stories like Gerald Durrell’s ‘Esmeralda’, where a truffle hunter accepts his wife running away with another man, but is ready to kill when the man returns for his truffle pig. Or a recent documentary The Truffle Hunters, which follows ageing hunters and their dogs in the Piedmont region of Italy, as they search for white truffles, the rarest of all. But reality is closer to the crimes shown in Pig, which the documentary acknowledges by profiling a passionate hunter who has stopped completely, disgusted by how unrestrained greed has changed the pursuit. In his exposé The Truffle Underground, crime reporter Ryan Jacobs gives the example of Stanley Ho, the casino tycoon of Macau who paid $330,000 at an auction for two large pieces of white truffle. With truffle yields declining in general, it created a situation where “economic desperation had amplified a casual culture of illegality and scandal, and it went far beyond theft: tax evasion, mislabelling, wholesale fraud, sabotage, poison, and, occasionally, violence.” Dogs and pigs were collateral damage, often stolen or killed.The allure of truffles is no accident. They are formed by underground fungal networks which propagate through spores spread by the above ground structures they develop, which we call mushrooms. But some fungi keep these structures underground, which means they must entice creatures to dig them up and spread the spores. As Merlin Sheldrake explains in Entangled Life, his fascinating new book on fungi, they do this by producing an exceptional smell: “Truffles must be pungent enough for their scent to penetrate the layers of soil and enter the air, distinctive enough for an animal to take note amid the ambient smellscape, and delicious enough for that animal to seek it out, dig it up and eat it.” Some of the chemicals seem linked to those that in pigs and humans stimulate our sexual instincts, making it trans-species seduction.Further proof that truffles need humans comes from one scientist Sheldrake consults, who points out that wild forests didn’t seem to produce truffles as well as the managed forests that Europeans started developing in recent centuries. One reason for their decline then might be the way conservationists focus on the remnants of truly wild forests – even recreating them – but allowing managed forests to be cut down to make way for urban development. There are clearly complex cross-species relationships involved here, which the careful foraging of traditional truffle hunters respect.The networks behind Goa’s termite mushrooms are no less complex. In a recent interview to Times of India, the microbiologist Nandakumar Kamat points out that termites dispose of natural detritus and biomass, but also seem to gain some critical sustenance from the fungal networks: “If the termites get deprived of the fungus, they will starve and die. That would release new viruses from the carrier insects and biotic structures of our forests and grasslands would collapse as mountains of dead plant matter would choke them. If this dry plant matter remains undiscomposed, forests would be prone to wildfires…”Unrestrained harvesting does not respect these relationships. And the global greed that causes it involves Indians as well. Many ultra-rich Indians are also vegetarians who, rather than celebrating the balance of our traditional cuisines, want to demonstrate their wealth through food. Expensive fungi, like truffles or the Kashmiri morels called gucchi, or Japanese matsutakes, fit this purpose very well. An Indian chef once told me of such dinner for which almost every truffle available that week in Europe was snapped up, at fabulous expense, and yet when it came to serve it, most of the guests were more interested in socialising than the food. It makes one wonder if the real crimes of the trade in truffles and other luxury fungi happen with the collectors or with the consumers, who eat them unthinking and uncaring of all the devastation that is being served up on their plates. 84904086