The rise of the Southern truffle?

White bianchetto truffles harvested at Burwell Farms

When you think of truffle country, perhaps you envision Europe—France, Spain, Italy. It in the not-so-distant future, though, you may think of the U.S. Southeast. Already, North Carolina is home to the country’s top-producing truffle farm, and its president thinks that the region will benefit as this new crop booms.

Truffles symbolize culinary luxury, and their rich and earthy fragrance is a biological adaptation. Like mushrooms, a truffle is the fruiting body of a fungus, a capsule full of spores; unlike mushrooms, truffles never rise from the ground, at least not of their own volition. To spread those spores, then, the truffle evolved a heady stink. “Every visual disadvantage that truffles face—being entombed in soil, difficult to spot once unearthed, and visually unappealing once spotted—they make up for with smell,” Merlin Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life.¹