What makes Rolls-Royce cars so much more expensive than other cars? And why is a can of Coke more expensive in Los Angeles than in Los Alamos? Or is it?
November 11, 2019, was a great day for truffles, a kind of edible fungi that grows underground. At an auction in Alba, near Turin, Italy, a single truffle sold for 120,000 euros (over $133,000). True, it was no ordinary truffle. This fellow was a genuine white European truffle weighing over 2.2 pounds. That comes to $133.45 per gram. And even that wasn’t the highest price ever paid. In 2012, some truffle-lover paid $300,000 for a single truffle.
Maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, truffles are among the rarest foods in the world.
But a truffle is just a fungus, like a mushroom. In fact, it is a kind of mushroom. What makes it so expensive?
Well, unlike mushrooms, which can be grown and harvested, truffles usually cannot be cultivated. You just have to go out and hunt for them where they grow in the wild, in a few places in Italy and France. Hunting is the word for it, too. The professionals use specially trained sniffer dogs to locate the truffles, typically hiding out underground in forests.
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