China’s hunger for luxury foods has led to demand for home-grown fungi and a new opportunity for farmers
Perhaps the most unusual food experience I had in China recently – as well as deep-fried scorpion and sliced yak’s penis – was sliced black truffle in a village near Kunming city, Yunnan province, south-west China. The Chinese middle-class is hungry for European luxury foods, and the country is meeting that demand with a burgeoning home-grown supply. In addition to truffles there’s a thriving caviar trade and some decent Chinese wines.
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Farmer Mao Xin Ping subsidises his income by truffle hunting. He and his wife go out between November and March, using only instinct and experience, not dogs as is common in Europe. I met him unearthing black truffles with a long-handled hoe in the woods above his farm.
I ask whether he likes truffles. “We don’t eat them,” the translator relays. “We used to feed them to pigs, but now they are treasure.” The couple fills two ice-cream tubs with truffles in the hour and a half we’re out.
These are the naturally occurring black tuber indicum truffles, less pungent and costly than the French tuber melanosporum. They fetch about £100 a kilo (the French Perigord variety go for more than £1,000).