17. Truffles

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Economics of Everyday Things

Episode 17 – “Truffles”

Host: Zachary Crockett (Freakonomics Radio Network)
Guests: Bessart Marina (Truffle importer, Euromushrooms), Jason McKinney (Truffle buyer & chef, Truffle Shuffle)
Date: February 26, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode delves into the fascinating and secretive world of the truffle trade—exploring why these lumpen, pungent fungi have become synonymous with luxury dining and high-stakes dealing. Host Zachary Crockett traces the journey of truffles from the soil of Europe via fiercely competitive hunters to the tables of elite American restaurants, guided mainly by two key players: Bessart Marina, a top U.S. truffle importer, and chef-turned-truffle-dealer Jason McKinney. The episode uncovers the economics driving truffle prices, the covert tactics and rivalries among hunters, and the tricks (and scams) that permeate this shadowy market.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Accidental Truffle Kingpin

• Bessart Marina’s Origin Story (01:07–03:20)
  • Fled Yugoslavia during the 1999 war, landing in the U.S. via restaurant work.
  • First exposure: “Why would people pay each slice $20? This makes no sense. You can buy three sandwiches with that money.” – Bessart Marina (01:41)
  • Through a lucky connection, received a shipment of truffles worth $16,000 without upfront payment—had to hustle to high-end L.A. restaurants to sell.
  • Memorable quote: “It was like the longest 30 seconds of my life. He grabbed one in his hand…looking at me, looking at the truffle, looking at me, but no smile…finally: ‘These truffles are beautiful.’” – Bessart Marina (02:42–03:20)

2. What Is a Truffle?

• Fungal Facts (03:20–04:33)
  • Truffles: The fruiting bodies of underground fungi (technically closer to potatoes/tubers than to mushrooms).
  • Over 100 species exist; white (Tuber magnatum) and black (Tuber melanosporum) truffles dominate the luxury market.
  • Market Size: Officially $36M/year imported into the U.S.—likely higher due to “off-books” trading.

3. Where Do Truffles Come From?

• Global & Shifting Supply (04:58–05:23)
  • Spain now leads with consistent black truffle supply; Bulgaria major for black summer truffles.
  • New truffle producing regions emerging: Australia, Romania, and minor operations in the U.S.
  • Black truffles can be cultivated (with great difficulty), but white truffles remain wild-only.
  • Truffle hunting: A “miner’s job,” competitive and often dangerous.

4. The Rivalrous, Risky, and Sometimes Violent Truffle Hunt

• Dogs, Danger & Drama (06:12–07:53)
  • Pigs replaced by trained dogs (Lagotto Romagnolo breed; value up to $10,000).
  • Training mimics drug dog methods: “You put first the truffle inside the tennis ball, and then you start playing with the dog as a puppy…” – Bessart Marina (07:02)
  • Territorial disputes trigger sabotage—vehicles blown up, wells poisoned, dogs killed, and shootouts between hunters.
  • “Every year, somebody steals, somebody loses, somebody tries to smuggle. Every year, there's something.” – Bessart Marina (07:53)

5. Logistics: An Exploding Clock

• Perishability, Distribution & Pricing (08:02–09:16)
  • Once harvested, truffles must be cleaned, shipped, and distributed within days; shelf life is about five days.
  • Marina’s operation: “We never have any truffle inventory. So when the truffles come, they go.” – Bessart Marina (08:27)
  • White truffles especially hard to preserve—their aroma (“like old socks mixed with garlic”) is volatile but prized.
  • Quote: “When you smell some cheese and it connects you with something in your past. That's how the white truffles are.” – Bessart Marina (09:25)

6. Deal-Making: The Truffle Underworld

• Secretive & High Stakes Trades (12:40–14:05)
  • Marinas’s first deal with McKinney: “He pulled out a quarter million dollars worth of truffles. I was just in disbelief.” – Jason McKinney (13:05)
  • Truffle deals resemble narcotics trades: late-night texts, secret meetings, gram scales.
  • “We would show up to restaurants in the middle of service…midnight, you name it, we were there.” – Jason McKinney (14:26)

7. Economics: Markups, Upsells & Shady Labeling

• Price Structure & Chef Perspective (14:05–16:49)
  • In 2025, black truffles sold for $700–$1,200/lb; white truffles for $2,000–$4,000/lb.
  • Restaurants markup further by selling truffles as an “upsell” at $10–$20/gram.
  • Truffles help justify high menu prices (“if you’re gonna charge $600 for the menu, you better put something…that’s worth the price.” – Bessart Marina (16:16))
  • Truffle origin stories: Most “French” black truffles actually come from Spain; many “Italian” whites sourced from Eastern Europe. Over 90% of so-called “Italian” truffles are originally from nearby countries.
  • “70% of the black winter truffles France itself is buying from Spain. A lot of the restaurants know they don't come from France.” – Bessart Marina (16:41)
  • The Italian brand is powerful; the labeling is loose and often misleading.

8. Imitation, Adulteration & Scams

• Chinese Counterfeit Truffles and Fake Products (17:10–18:47)
  • Influx of Chinese grafted tuber indicum—flavorless but visually similar to black truffles—mixed into shipments to increase volume and weight.
  • “They put metal pins in the truffles to increase the weight.” – Jason McKinney (18:15)
  • Truffle oils & salts rarely contain real truffle.

9. Passion & Pathos: Why Do It?

• The Emotional Connection (19:20–19:58)
  • For true aficionados and dealers, truffles are more than commerce.
  • “When I have a white truffle that I hold it in my hands, it's love…It's almost like an infection in my veins that I must do this. And when the profit comes from it, also, it's a welcome side effect.” – Bessart Marina (19:20)
  • “This business…is not good for people with heart problems.” – Bessart Marina (20:17)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Why would people pay each slice $20? This makes no sense. You can buy three sandwiches with that money.”
  — Bessart Marina (01:41)
• “You put first the truffle inside the tennis ball, and then you start playing with the dog as a puppy…based on the smell…”
  — Bessart Marina (07:02)
• “He pulled out a quarter million dollars worth of truffles. I was just in disbelief.”
  — Jason McKinney (13:05)
• “The industry is very similar to the narcotics industry…sales are done by text messages. Late at night, you show up with a gram scale…”
  — Jason McKinney (13:31)
• “When you smell some cheese and it connects you with something in your past. That's how the white truffles are.”
  — Bessart Marina (09:25)
• “When I have a white truffle that I hold it in my hands, it's love…it's almost like an infection in my veins that I must do this…”
  — Bessart Marina (19:20)
• “This business…is not good for people with heart problems.”
  — Bessart Marina (20:17)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:07 – Bessart Marina’s backstory and first truffle deal
• 04:00 – Technical explanation: What truffles are
• 05:23 – Cultivation and hunting methods; dangers of the trade
• 07:02 – Truffle dog training details
• 08:27 – How truffles move from ground to plate (logistics)
• 13:05 – High-stakes truffle deals and chef anecdotes
• 14:26 – Price breakdown and restaurant markups
• 16:41 – The great truffle origin “sham”
• 18:15 – Truffle adulteration with Chinese imports
• 19:20 – The passion behind a truffle merchant’s life

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Tone and Language

The episode maintains an engaging and slightly mischievous tone—balancing awe for culinary luxury with skeptical curiosity about the truffle black market. Both Marina and McKinney tell their stories with humor, candor, and an undercurrent of economic realism, using vivid, sensory language (“old socks mixed with garlic”; “infection in my veins”).

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Conclusion

This episode of The Economics of Everyday Things unlocks the mystique behind truffles—revealing both the allure and the dark corners of the business. From perilous forest hunts and clandestine deals to kitchen tables and questionable labeling, listeners get a rich, sensory, and economic journey into one of the world's most coveted ingredients. For anyone curious about what makes truffles extraordinary, and why they command such extraordinary prices, this episode is an eye-opener.

Transcript

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[Zachary Crockett]

When Bessart Marina was 18 years old, his whole world was crashing down. It was the spring of 1999, and Yugoslavia was violently breaking apart. Like millions of others, Marina fled. He came to America with little to his name and found work at a restaurant. And there, under the fluorescent lights of the prep station, he encountered a pungent little delicacy that would change his life.

[Bessart Marina]

In this restaurant, we started serving truffles. So I'm like, why would people pay each slice $20? This makes no sense. You can buy three sandwiches with that money.

[Zachary Crockett]

Marina decided that he wanted to learn everything he could about truffles. And eventually, through a friend of a friend, he got hold of a supplier in Croatia.

[Bessart Marina]

After a week, he called me, says, I sent you four kilos of truffles. I'm like, whoa, no, no, no. I was very stressed because I didn't have the money to pay.

[Zachary Crockett]

At the time. That four kilos, or about nine pounds of truffles, was worth $16,000. They were also a ticking time bomb. With each passing day, the truffles lost weight and decreased in value. If Marina didn't sell them fast, he was in big trouble. So he drove from Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles, a land of fancy restaurants, and took destiny into his own hands.

[Bessart Marina]

I got one of those burgundy Zagat magazines, and in there you have all the restaurants. So I started calling from the hotel room. I'm like, my name is Bessart. Do you want to see the best truffles in the world. The first chef that I went to, I bring like a big styrofoam box inside, and the chef looks at it. Then it was like the longest 30 seconds of my life. I mean, he grabbed one in his hand. He was looking at me, looking at the truffle, looking at me, but no smile. And finally he looks back, he says, these truffles are beautiful.

[Zachary Crockett]

With a day and a half of work, Marina paid back the truffle supplier and pocketed a few thousand bucks for himself. It was the start of a strange and lucrative new career for the Freakonomics radio network. This is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, truffles. Nothing about the physical appearance of truffles screams luxury. They are by definition, the fruiting bodies of underground fungus. Their spores are transmitted via animal feces, and they kind of look like weird, lumpy golf balls.

[Jason McKinney]

Technically, they're actually tubers, which means they're closer to potatoes than mushrooms. But the easiest way to explain it is it's a fancy mushroom.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Jason McKinney. He's a high volume truffle buyer and the founder of an online cooking class company called truffle shuffle. McKinney says that while there are well over a hundred species of truffles out there, two of them make up most of the market.

[Jason McKinney]

So in a nice restaurant, the two most common truffles you'll see is white truffles, which is tuber magnatum, and black truffles, which is tuber melanosporum.

[Zachary Crockett]

According to data from the US Department of Agriculture, around $36 million worth of truffles were imported over the past year. But that figure, it doesn't tell the full story. A lot of truffle commerce isn't easily tracked, and the value of shipments is often underreported. Bessart Marina says those truffles come from all over the world.

[Bessart Marina]

Spain has the biggest supply of black winter truffles in the last 10, 15 years. Spain produces so many tons per year that it became a very consistent, predictable commodity. We don't have the volatile ups and downs. Then. Bulgaria produces the majority of the black summer truffles.

[Zachary Crockett]

Climate change and shifting weather patterns are causing truffles to pop up in new parts of the world. There are growing markets in places like Australia and Romania and even some smaller pockets of production in America. But the most coveted truffles come from Italy and France. Most black truffles today are cultivated, meaning they're grown underground near the roots of trees in organized orchards. It can take 10 years or more to set up an operation like this, and even then, there's no guarantee it will work. White truffles are notoriously resistant to any form of farming and have to be found in the wild. In both cases, the journey to your plate begins with the people who make a living digging them up. Truffle hunters.

[Bessart Marina]

This is like a miner's job. You dig in the ground, and it's not as sexy as it sounds. The hunters wake up in the morning and they pick as many truffles as they can. They select them in categories, and they know at the end of the day that anything that they pick, we will buy from them.

[Zachary Crockett]

For many years, truffle hunters used pigs to discover their underground fortunes. But the pigs, they were a little too fond of truffles. They'd often eat them before hunters could wrestle them away. Today, truffle hunting pigs are banned. In Italy, dogs have taken their place. The most prized truffle dogs, typically of the Lagotto Romagnolo breed, sell for up to $10,000. Marina says they have to be rigorously trained.

[Bessart Marina]

It's similar procedure that they use with the dogs that find drugs at the airports. You put first the truffle inside the tennis ball, and then you start playing with a dog as a puppy, and the dog always finds it. Now, based on the smell,

[Zachary Crockett]

a truffle hunter can earn a pretty good living. And that makes it a brutally competitive and sometimes violent pursuit. Truffle hunters have been known to blow up competitors, pickup trucks, contaminate water wells, and shoot people who intrude on their territory. In Italy, dozens of truffle dogs are poisoned and killed each year. In truffle producing regions of France, paramilitary officers conduct traffic stops searching for stolen tubers.

[Bessart Marina]

Every year, somebody steals, somebody loses, somebody tries to smuggle. Every year, there's something.

[Zachary Crockett]

When all goes well, truffles are rounded up into batches and exported all over the world to people like Marina. Twenty years into his career, he's now one of the largest truffle merchants in the U.S. he says his company, Euromushrooms, imports around 40,000 pounds of truffles into the U.S. every year. In underground truffle circles, he is known as the kingpin.

[Bessart Marina]

So day one, the hunter finds a truffle. They bring it to a collection point. The collection point sends it to our facility. Day two, we clean it, preserve it. Day three, it ships. Then it arrives in us in 14 hours. We immediately distribute. We never have any truffle inventory. So when the truffles come, they go.

[Zachary Crockett]

As Jason McKinney knows, in the truffle world, every minute counts.

[Jason McKinney]

The prime shelf life of a truffle out of the ground is five days. They get really soft, and you can't shave them. The black truffles you can preserve and then turn it into things like butter, soup, items like that. The white truffles are a little bit harder to be able to preserve and really capture that essence that they deliver.

[Zachary Crockett]

And that's very important because that smell is the truffle's biggest selling point.

[Bessart Marina]

White truffle has the smell of almost like old socks mixed with garlic mixed with. I mean, it's a very different aroma. When I send the drivers to pick up the truffles from the hunters and they put them in the car, they say, bessart, are you sure this is what you want to pay money for? You know, but after you get used to the aroma, it's almost a tear comes out of your eye. It's a beautiful smell. You know, it's almost kind of basic human, like when you smell some cheese and it connects you with something in your past. That's how the white truffles are.

[Zachary Crockett]

Once truffles are out of the ground, they have to get to the market very quickly. Sometimes customs officials will hold a shipment worth well over six figures, and all Marina can do is wait in agony.

[Bessart Marina]

It's very stressful.

[Zachary Crockett]

Once the truffles are in Marina's hands, he sells them in bulk to a network of distributors in major cities all over the country. He says he gets about a 5.5% markup after expenses.

[Bessart Marina]

We send to Chicago, 10 kilos, to New York, 20. And then they go around the restaurants and they get to build relationships with the chefs.

[Zachary Crockett]

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[Zachary Crockett]

Chef Jason McKinney still remembers the parking lot in Northern California where he first met Bessart Marina, AKA the Kingpin.

[Jason McKinney]

He was in sweatpants, right? Thick accent. And I was like, is this guy legit or not legit? What am I doing? And I was like, do you have any, do you have any truffles?

[Bessart Marina]

He's like, sure. So how much do you need, Jason?

[Jason McKinney]

We go out to his brand new Range Rover and I swear to God, he pulled out a quarter million dollars worth of truffles. I was just in disbelief.

[Bessart Marina]

When he looks at them, he looks at me, he looks at them, he looks at them, he goes, oh, you have truffles? Yeah, we do.

[Zachary Crockett]

This kind of back alley, secretive deal making is pretty standard in the truffle business.

[Jason McKinney]

It can be pretty intense, you know, and the industry is very similar to the narcotics industry, where most sales are done by text messages. Late at night, you show up with a gram scale to weigh everything out on.

[Zachary Crockett]

McKinney had his own unique journey into the truffle space. He grew up in a broken home in Georgia, became a chef, and eventually scrapped his way into one of the most prestigious restaurants in the world, the three Michelin starred French Laundry in California. He spent four years there.

[Jason McKinney]

So the French Laundry probably uses the largest amount of truffles out of any restaurant in the US it really is just an incredible ingredient. You know, when it was white truffle season, you would smell it through the whole restaurant.

[Zachary Crockett]

Eventually, McKinney started a side hustle with a friend selling truffles to restaurants. And it very quickly became a gainful enterprise.

[Jason McKinney]

In the first 90 days, we made 100 grand, which, you know, to put it in perspective, I mean, I made $12 an hour as a chef, and then the next year we made a half million dollars, let's say it's the black truffles. We're buying them for $300 a pound. The going rate in the restaurants is 700 a pound. And so the do is you go in and you tell the hostess or the host that you have a meeting with the chef, which you don't. And then the chef comes out and he's mad. But then you say, chef, I have some truffles you would like to see. And then he's less mad, but still mad. The chef always wants to see them, right? We would show up to restaurants in the middle of service, midnight, you name it, we were there.

[Zachary Crockett]

Last year, the going rate for winter black truffles was 700 to $1,200 a pound. White truffles went for 2,000 to $4,000 a pound. And the most exceptional specimens can fetch much, much more. A 3.3 pound white truffle from Tuscany once commanded $330,000 at auction. The value depends on the aroma, the density and the aesthetics.

[Jason McKinney]

When you go into these nice restaurants and they come and they shave the truffles over a dish, you want them to be nice and round.

[Zachary Crockett]

For high end restaurants, spending a few thousand dollars on truffles is worth the investment. Restaurants will often use truffles as an upsell, an additional topping to a meal. They might offer to shave a few slices over a dish for an additional cost of $10 to $20 per gram. And many establishments will recommend 5 to 7 grams per dish. Marina says that truffles are a way to justify Michelin star prices.

[Bessart Marina]

You know, if you're gonna charge a person $600 for the menu, you better put something in that menu that's special and that's worth the price.

[Zachary Crockett]

For chefs, the most coveted truffles are the Italian whites and the French blacks. But Marina says there's a truffle sham quietly being perpetrated in the shadows.

[Bessart Marina]

70% of the black winter truffles France itself is buying from Spain. A lot of the restaurants know they don't come from France.

[Zachary Crockett]

And those white truffles that are marketed

[Bessart Marina]

as Italian, Italy is the kind of major hub for these truffles. So anybody in Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, all these countries find the truffle. Their main goal is how to get it to Italy.

[Zachary Crockett]

So a large portion of those so called Italian truffles actually come from eastern

[Bessart Marina]

European countries, more than 90%. What Italians have done a great job

[Zachary Crockett]

at is marketing the Italian truffle purveyors. We reached out to did not respond to our request for an interview to be Clear. Italy does source truffles locally, and there are many truffle hunters that make a living there. But the country often isn't transparent about the origins of the truffles that it exports. That lack of clarity carries over to other parts of the truffle industry, too. In the us the laws around product labeling are pretty flimsy. Many foods that claim to contain expensive truffles, like olive oils and artisanal salts, actually don't have any truffles in them at all. And in recent years, another issue has plagued the truffle industry. Less scrupulous black truffle harvesters have started to water down their batches with inferior truffles.

[Jason McKinney]

There's another truffle called tuber indicum. It looks like your black truffle, and they grow in China and you can rake them up. And what happens when you rake them up is they don't have the aroma, they don't have the flavor, they don't have the taste. And so, you know, beautiful black truffles out of Europe, Melanosporum. A few hundred dollars a pound. These things are a few dollars a pound. And so basically, people would cut and mix them and put metal pins in the truffles to increase the weight.

[Zachary Crockett]

These inferior truffles make their way into major high volume hotel markets like Las Vegas and Macau, and are served to unwitting customers who invariably end up wondering what all the truffle fuss is about. But true truffle diehards like Bessaert Marina know exactly what the fuss is about. In the truffle, the kingpin found his kindred spirit. He too, rose from the soils of Europe, traveled across the globe, and created a fortune.

[Bessart Marina]

When I have a white truffle that I hold it in my hands, it's love. I don't have the same feeling for meat. I don't have the same feeling for caviar, you know, but I have that feeling for truffles. So it's almost like an infection in my veins that I must do this. It's something that I started doing 24 years ago and something that I continue doing. And when the profit comes from it, also, it's a welcome side effect.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Lyric Bowditch and Daniel Moritz Rapson.

[Bessart Marina]

This business, Zachary, is not good for people with heart problems.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side of Everything.

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