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Comment by Posibyte | Hacker News Reader

I read in the article that truffles are outside of the domain of human ability to control its growth.

  > Truffles are the world’s most expensive food because they resist all our efforts to control them. They cannot be mass produced or meaningfully eaten out of season.

Have there been any efforts to create some controlled version of truffles to meet demand or make it more available? To me, the idea of a GMO truffle that's available year round seems pleasing.

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Yes, in fact the cultivated truffle industry is starting to get going now. In the past few years, farmed truffles have appeared on the market. I tried truffles for the first time a month ago and they came from Australia, presumably one of the new farms there.

The history of this is pretty fascinating.

Truffles grow in the roots of certain oak trees. To cultivate them, you need to plant those trees, carefully protect them from other undesired fungi, and wait 7 to 10 years for the fungus network to mature in the trees roots. Any given tree has an active lifecycle of only about 30 years, so after that, you have to replant. This process was figured out in the late 1700s. By the 1800s, there were over 100,000 acres of truffle farms in France, and truffles were a reasonably priced easily available foodstuff.

Then WWI hit. 20% of the male workforce was killed and many others had left rural areas and moved into cities. Without expertise and available labor, many truffle fields were lost. This is when they became a rare expensive luxury.

In the past few decades, after truffles became fashionable, cultivation has started again. It's only in the past few years that these new fields have begun to sell product. Going forward, you can probably expect real truffles to become more common and less expensive.

Oh, and the truffle I tried was shaved on top of a mushroom risotto. It's possibly the best tasting thing I have ever eaten.

The recent discovery (appeared on HN I think) about a complex, three-organism symbiotic relationship in lichens explained why it has heretofore been nearly impossible to grow them in "captivity". I wonder if there is a similar discovery waiting to be made about truffles.

There's a guy in Tennessee that's spent decades trying to grow black truffles (melanosporum) commercially. It sounds like he's having some ups and downs: http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/26/living/domestic-truffles-eatoc...

Here's his website http://tennesseetruffle.com/

The distinctive scent/flavor is probably highly influenced by soil conditions. Also they're symbiotic with trees, and the tree health probably also affects flavors.

It'd probably be easier to GMO standard mushrooms to taste more like truffles.

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