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‘Truffle Oil’ Without Any Actual Truffles
By EUGENIA BONESEPT. 15, 2017

My cousin Mario, who lives in Certaldo, Italy, north of Florence, is a retired barber who hunts white truffles. One year when we joined him on a hunt, Mario gave my father a truffle about the size of an almond, which he dropped into the inside pocket of an old bomber jacket. On the train ride back to Florence, that tiny truffle filled the car with an extraordinary scent, an intoxicating, slightly nasty and wholly seductive mixture of garlic and lilies and dirty socks.

Throughout dinner that evening my father, who was in his 80s, kept opening his jacket to sniff. Indeed, as we crossed the Ponte Vecchio in Florence on the way back to our hotel, he stopped a pair of tourists from Wisconsin. “You want to smell something special?” he asked, opening his jacket. “Smell this! Come on, smell it!”

They didn’t seem keen on sticking their noses into my father’s sleeve, but that was O.K. — we all could smell the truffle from three feet away.

It is a truly heady perfume, but a transient one. In the case of the white truffle of Italy, the aromatic compounds, which may be weakened by bacterial symbionts that live on the truffle, start to degrade after about four days. By the time we had moved on to Rome a few days later, the truffle didn’t smell like much at all. Maybe a very old mothball.

Here in the United States, bottling the truffle has become big business. In May, four class-action lawsuits filed in New York and California accused Trader Joe’s, Urbani Truffles, Sabatino and Monini of fraud of “false, misleading, and deceptive misbranding” of its truffle oil products. If you look at the labels of these brands’ truffle oils, you’ll find that the ingredients include truffle “aroma” or “flavor” or “essence.” That’s the chemical 2,4-dithiapentane. Also known as bis (methylthio) methane, it supplies a fair imitation of the natural truffle smell.

These lawsuits argue that the consumer is unlikely to know that “flavor” doesn’t mean fungus. “In the law, you can advertise something honestly,” Bonnie Paton of the nonprofit organization Truth in Advertising told me, “and it still can be considered deceptive marketing because the reasonable consumer is not an expert in this area.” A reasonable consumer, she told me, would assume that these products actually contained truffles.

Ever since Jeffrey Steingarten broke the story in Vogue in 2003, it has been common knowledge among aficionados that truffle oil is typically synthetically flavored. But dubious truffle oil products have proliferated. For instance, Walmart now sells Roland Extra Virgin Olive Oil With White Truffle. Its 1.86 ounces, about the equivalent volume of an egg, cost $18. On its ingredient list: “truffle aroma.”

My cousin Maria, the truffle hunter’s wife, used to make truffle oil with the broken bits of truffle she couldn’t serve, but not to preserve the flavor — the oil was flavorful for only as long as a fresh truffle. Much as we may want to capture truffles in a jar, the biology isn’t accommodating.

Truffle oil is just one of the products that take advantage of buyers’ ignorance. Many truffle butter products are flavored with a Marmite-like substance called hydrated vegetable protein. Face creams touting probiotics confuse the mind with scientific-sounding jargon, like “beneficial biotilys probiotic technology.” But not everyone thinks to check the claims of every product they buy.

In August, a federal judge in New York dismissed the case against Monini. (The other three cases are pending.) As the judge, Louis Stanton, wrote, “Courts routinely conclude that where a product describes itself as substance-flavored despite not containing the actual substance, and the ingredient list truthfully reflects that fact, as a matter of law the product would not confuse a reasonable consumer acting reasonably under the circumstances, and thus does not sustain a consumer fraud claim.”

In other words, buyer beware. Or take a biology class before you shop.

Eugenia Bone is the author of “Mycophilia: Revelations From the Weird World of Mushrooms” and “Microbia: A Journey Into the Unseen World Around You.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/opinion/truffle-oil-chemicals.html?