Visit Alba in October and you'll be just in time for the local truffle festival. The streets will be packed with vendors, and the air thick with the scent of this delicious, edible fungus. Every restaurant in town will feature it's best truffle dish. Witnessing such a scene you would never guess at the relative scarcity of the truffle.

Every year farmers head out in the dead of night. They take their truffle sniffing pigs or dogs and steal off to the fields. The location of a truffle crop is normally a very closely guarded secret. Poaching is a genuine problem, and with good reason. A harvest of black market truffles could make a poacher wealthy and it could bankrupt the farmer. You see, ounce for ounce truffles are the most expensive natural food in the world. It's not at all unusual for this fungus to sell for as much as $250 dollars an ounce. According to Wikipedia the most expensive truffle of all was sold at auction for $330,000 dollars. As such there are some very strict laws regarding the harvest and sale of this prized edible. A truffle thief could end up in jail.

The cost of the truffle is due to it's scarcity. The truffle grows in symbiosis with trees. The fungus covers the roots of the tree and feeds off carbohydrates produced by its host. In return the fungus helps the tree absorb vital minerals from the soil. The truffle is actually the fruit of the fungus. Just as an apple is the fruit of the apple tree. Usually the host is an oak or a willow, but no one can figure out exactly what causes the fungus to take hold.

Natural growths of the delicacy have been greatly depleted by deforestation and environmental concerns like pollution and global warming. The yearly truffle harvest is less than a quarter of what it was a hundred years ago and it gets a little smaller every year. Scientists and farmers have tried in vain to reproduce the conditions necessary to propagate the truffle but to date no one has succeeded.

If you have a yen to try truffle now is as good a time as any. The harvest is getting smaller, and prices are getting higher. In fact, there's some fear that the truffle might dwindle off into extinction.

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