Lab grown truffles? These are the days of Miracle and Wonder

It’s a chilly winter morning. Not blowing-into-cupped-hands chilly, but still cold enough for layers. I’ve arrived at the orchards with Coco, Scratch, Boston, and Elle — my canine companions for the day, and every other day on the farm.

The sky is cloudless, as so many of our winter days are up here, with the sun angling low through the trees and sparkling off the melting frost. The team jump off the truck, and their noses go straight to ground, reading signs that I’m oblivious to. I let them explore for a while before a sharp whistle gathers them up for a quick pep talk and a treat — a ritual they’ve  come to expect before work begins.

I choose a direction and start with the now-familiar call: “Where’s the truffle, Coco? Where’s the truffle, Boston?” Coco has become the lead hunter this season, taking over from Scratch, who, at 13 years old, is slowing considerably, even if she’s reluctant to admit so herself.

A few minutes in, and Coco’s head swivels. She tracks back a little to the base of a Holly Oak, where she paws at the ground. We all gather, and I scoop up a handful of red loam and give it an expectant sniff... nothing. We all wait for Scratch, who does things in her own good time these days. When she arrives, however, she’s all business, marking a spot a little way from Coco’s. Scratch is the laser to Coco’s shotgun. Coco works in generalities; Scratch is specific. If Scratch marks a truffle, it’s almost always found directly under her mark. I’ve often told her that she’s the best truffle dog in South Africa, and she takes pride in that.

I raise another handful of soil and there it is — that distinct truffle aroma, alluring and earthy, this one with nutty chocolate overtones. We perceive a truffle’s aroma via a complex array of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), emitted not only by the truffle but also by the bacterial communities inhabiting its surface. VOCs are microscopic airborne molecules made up of hydrocarbons and attached atoms of nitrogen, carbon, sulphur, and other elements. Truffles emit some of the highest concentrations of VOCs in the fungal kingdom, joining a celebrity A-list of other foods at the VOC gala awards — coffee, chocolate, strawberries, garlic, cheese, herbs, bread, and wine, to name a few.

To date, scientists have identified more than 200 distinct VOCs across various truffle species. A truffle’s aroma can vary significantly, even among the same species and from the same orchard, and even from the same truffle a few hours apart. The base note is always “truffle” — an earthy, rich, and alluring aroma that seems impossible to define, almost more evolutionary memory than scent. Overlaying this, one finds a wide array of top notes: cacao, nuts, mushrooms, berries, and pepper. Some have a surprising chemical smell, almost like spilled diesel or hospital ammonia — so much so that one was recently rejected by a top restaurant as being contaminated.

Harvesting truffles is slow, methodical work, and it provides plenty of time to think. The orchard through which I walk, now nearly 10 years old, carries a genetic lineage via the fungal symbiont on its roots to the traditional truffle grounds of Europe, and then some, all the way back to the Cretaceous period 120 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed and the concept of bipedal Homo sapiens hadn’t even made it on to the evolutionary drawing board. Truffles are certainly no Johnny-come-latelies, that’s for sure — they’ve seen things...

It’s getting warm now and my companions are starting to tire. I have a half-bag of truffles slung over my shoulder, aromatic and comfortingly weighty. I know the dogs have maybe 40 minutes of energy left before they lose interest, so I decide to make our way back to the truck, taking the long way around.

There’s something magical about the word “truffle”. It flutters off the tongue like the rustle of autumn leaves, captivating and exotic. Its allure has spawned a whole industry of truffle-flavoured products: truffle oil, truffle chips, truffle chocolate, truffle gin, truffle paste — truffle this, truffle that. Mostly premium-priced products that actually contain no truffle, instead relying on a petroleum-based additive called 2,4-dithiapentane to give them their “truffle-like” flavour. Ironically, 2,4-dithiapentane is also the primary compound found in halitosis, foot odour, flatulence, and formaldehyde... but hey, knock yourself out… please, feel free!

As we walk, I think about an article I read recently about lab-grown truffles, purportedly cultivated in something called “moss chambers” by a Pretoria based biolab. There’s very little information available about the company — no website, no listed products, and no published papers verifying their methodology — just a few features in lifestyle magazines and an Instagram account. Truffles grown on moss? I find the claim hard to fathom.

The lyrics of a song spring to mind… written by Paul Simon way back when the world seemed a far more innocent place. 

It’s a turn-around jump shot
It’s everybody’s jump start
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
Think of the boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby don’t cry

(Paul Simon – The Boy in the Bubble)

The melody sticks with me as I follow the dogs through the trees.

Since the mid-18th century, scientists have striven to classify all life forms. Anyone who has taken a biology class will probably remember the taxonomy system — kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. These classifications are based on biological processes, evolutionary features, and ecological relationships, offering a precise definition of what any particular life form is.

Truffles, such as Tuber melanosporum, belong to the family Tuberaceae. A defining characteristic of Tuberaceae is that they are obligate mycorrhizal. The term “mycorrhizal” comes from two Greek root words: “myco-” meaning “fungus” and “-rhiza” meaning “root”. In essence, they are classified as fungi that form relationships with plant roots, and “obligate” meaning that they cannot survive without this relationship.

So, is it possible that truffles have somehow been coerced into adopting moss as their symbiotic host in a lab environment? “Moss chambers”... the phrase is delightfully comforting, but moss as a symbiont host for a mycorrhizal fungus? Unlikely. You see, a truffle develops and grows in an embryonic way, connected via its mycelium to the vascular system of a plant, which in turn supplies the nutrients the truffle requires to develop — much like the umbilical cord in mammals. Mosses, for their part, belong to the phylum Bryophyta, which, and here’s the kicker, are a group of non-vascular plants. They do not have a vascular system to transport nutrients, so they cannot possibly form a symbiotic relationship with mycorrhizal fungi.

Furthermore, moss and fungi come from fundamentally different biological kingdoms and have no direct evolutionary connection. They serve different ecological roles and cannot form the type of symbiotic relationship required for truffles to develop. To put it bluntly, the likelihood of successfully growing truffles using moss as the symbiont is about as realistic as growing pineapples on a Dalmatian.

My only assumption is that these lab-grown truffles are produced via cell culture, a technique first attributed to Ross Granville Harrison in 1907, whereby individual cells are encouraged to replicate using growth stimulants. Although cultured truffles may share the genetic make-up of their wild counterparts, they lack the ecological context essential for a wild truffle to develop, and for a wild truffle to develop its full flavour, aroma and character. To put it another way: a lab-grown truffle is as much a truffle as a lab-grown steak is a cow.

When I get home, I spread the morning’s harvest out on the table for inspection. Curiously, the truffles’ aroma seems to have faded. That’s the thing about truffles... their aroma is almost bashful. Give it too much attention, and it recedes, evasive. Leave it out on a table unattended, and it will come and find you in the furthest reaches of the house. I once flew to Cape Town with a box of truffles in my hand luggage, which became highly excited by the occasion and filled the entire cabin with their funky aroma. Absolute delight to me; however, I could swear I saw other passengers giving each other accusatory glances.

As I pack the morning’s harvest into storage containers, another thought occurs. Maybe “moss chamber” is being used figuratively here, a metaphor of sorts — decidedly unscientific, for sure, but another matter entirely. In a world where supermarket shelves are groaning under products self-identifying as something they are not, what does a little creative licence matter? As long as it sells... right?

Well, maybe in the world of mass production and bottom lines, but that’s not the whole picture. You see, the food we eat is more than just the sum of its parts. It shares in its flavour an essence, a story, of where it was grown and how it grew, of its struggles and triumphs as a living organism. It’s a story intertwined with the heart of the farmer and the hands of the artisan, and threads deeply through family, community, culture, and history. Food is undoubtedly a story that binds. It’s inextricably tied to how we define ourselves. Ask anyone what they feel like for supper — Italian, Korean, Chinese, French, Argentinian, or Greek — and they’ll instantly know what’s on the menu.

Cultures worldwide celebrate their most cherished ingredients with festivals and fairs: tamales during Día de la Candelaria in Mexico, pomegranates during Jashn-e Anar in Iran, cheese at France’s Fête des Fromages and Switzerland’s Käsefest, while Spain’s La Tomatina honours the humble tomato in a riot of squishy colour. Beer, chocolate, lobster, garlic, chillies, blueberries, truffles, cherries, salt, onions, saffron, persimmons, figs, oysters, beef, corn, apples — name any ingredient, and you’ll most probably find it celebrated somewhere.

Natural ingredients and the cherished recipes that they inspire are tightly interwoven with who we are. They bring together families around the Sunday table, they unite communities through harvests and festivals, they mark the passing of the seasons, and enrich our religious and cultural customs. They connect us to our ancestry, to the land, to farmers, artisans, cooks, family, friends and lovers. They link us to place, memory, and emotion.

I remember my first taste of Jamón Ibérico in Cabanas del Castillo in 2004 like it was yesterday, just as vividly as the anchovies bought fresh off the quay on the Black Sea, prepared ceviche-style with Kastamonu garlic, local olive oil and lemons. I can still recall the taste and texture of the warm white krummelpap with milk and sugar that I had almost every morning for breakfast as a child, and the first time I tasted proper Karoo lamb, cooked on the open coals under a flaming Camdeboo sunset. 

Some flavours are so deeply tied to place and emotion that they become impossible to recreate — like the coconut fish curry made for me by a quiet Indian fisherman while night fishing on a little wooden skiff under a billion stars in the Arabian Sea in ’94, or that gazpacho I had in Andalusia while in love with a Spanish girl, or the sweet burst of sun-dried raisins, stolen off the vine while hiking in Cappadocia, or the vibrant goat stew slapped down on the table in Lusaka and served with ice-cold Mosi lager and chips while joyously catching up with long lost friends.

I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where taste is defined by a formula and soil is replaced by a petri dish. I’m done with packaged and processed — I don’t want to be tube-fed my tastes. I want to share in my food’s life story: where it came from and how it lived its life — and to share the experience through the hands that prepared it and the culture that celebrates it. I want to explore the world through its unique and varied natural ingredients, embracing the myriad flavours and textures this God-given miracle called life offers. 

The world’s natural ingredients make life a far richer experience, and no lab-produced substitute will ever replace that. DM

Max is a former tavern sage, wayfarer, dreamer, and errant light chaser. Nowadays, he spends most of his days burrowing amongst the roots and tubers of his truffle orchard in the Southern Drakensberg, accompanied by his six canine companions and his newly adopted spirit animal, the dung beetle. He dreams of a more unconventional life.

This piece is a response to this story by Marie-Lais Emond, after TGIFood asked truffle farmer Max Bastard if he would like to offer a rejoinder.

Find Willowdale Truffles here.