“Time’s up” said the big white cursive letters on a royal blue background emblazoned with the misshapen meteor of the white Alba truffle. How subtle”. I figured they were referring to the fact that time to enjoy the annual festival for the White Truffle of Alba was, obviously, almost up. The November Piemontese air was crisp only in temperature as the Cortile della Maddalena was heavily perfumed with the heavy musk of the tuber, a single piece of which can fetch prices in the thousands. Stalls had clear cases lain out with the little globules sitting on pieces of paper marked with weight and price and all around milled people with far more years – and euros – than I. Older Italian groups smartly dressed in button-downs  and colorful scarves. Chinese and Korean families whose children’s palates were trained on the fine nuances of tuber magnatum pico at an early age. There was also the one portly American in a sports jersey, wild hair tucked beneath a baseball cap, who conducted his business of purchasing the fungal boogers loudly for all to hear. Also present were the young locals who, like myself, were willing to shell out the equivalent of several full meals for a few shavings of the famed white lumps. Granted shavings here were more generous, even if lain atop a simple dish of fried eggs or the local tajarin. The odor and taste too were far more potent than the ones more dramatically flourished but perceptibly weaker in more metropolitan locales. It was a spectacle for sure and worth the hype once you put aside the thought that all this was for a symbiote whose name in Latin meant “a swelling”.

The truffle has a certain scent of mystery seeing as it lives its whole life underground by the roots of specific trees. There are the odd bits of trivia. They have to be shat out by animals in order to propagate. People once thought these fungal mycorrhizae were formed by a combination of water, heat, and lightning (in reality they only form out of a relationship between a tree and a fungus who lack something the other has). You need a very well-trained hog, and more recently, dogs to find them. And despite an association with words that don’t quite sound appetizing – there’s something icky about using the word “sacs” and “ramified veins” when describing the truffle – it’s been a popular food since the Middle Ages when its aroma was thought to produce feelings of ecstasy. Like many other edibles, a bit of ingenious food marketing by an hotelier who would gift them to celebrities, government officials, and popes, turned this hardened snot-like edible from a local delicacy to something one orders in a Miami clubstaurant even if one has no clue what it is and whether it makes sense to be on the plate tastewise. There’s also a deliciously dark Nicholas Cage movie on the thing.

Later that week, I found myself in front of a church framed by the cracking sound of falling leaves. I stood opposite a smiling man in a worn hunting vest and a boisterous dog with muddy paws named Charlie. Our Trifolau, truffle hunters, for a daytime hunt that I and a few other tourists were assured was not staged. The ground was moist from the light rains of the past few weeks and our guides explained in translated Italian the basics of the truffle hunt: how they were normally done at night, what the dogs smell for, how the truffles were carefully dug out from where they seemed to blend into dirt and root, the differences between the white truffle and the black summer ones, and the fact that no one’s managed to successfully cultivate the white truffle. The cool air would periodically sink into the strong, wet, hay-like mustiness that even we would pick up with our inferior noses. There was no frantic barking from Charlie as if he were hunting live prey. Just a brisk trot over to the right root for the experienced hunter to dig under in exchange for a treat.

Conversations as we continued on a slight incline turned to the matters of the truffle not apparent in the festival grounds below or in the many advertisements online: of the fierce competition that would lead to hunters kidnapping and poisoning dogs, of a public bamboozled into paying exorbitantly for inferior truffles and truffle oil thousands of miles away in places that were Italian by exaggerated theatrics only, of a once simple weekend activity of kids and dogs picking through the forest floor changed forever by industry. It was certainly eye-opening though paling in comparison to the realization that I had completely misunderstood the festival theme.

It was from an offhand comment actually. Somewhere near the peak of the hill we were climbing and after we had already dug up a few truffles to take back into town, the hunter commented: “The truffles will all be gone for good soon. Most of us think so”. “Why?” someone asked. “Well this year’s truffles are smaller than last year due to the weather amongst other things, and smaller from the year before that, and next year they’ll be smaller yet.” It dawned on me that “Time’s up” literally meant that the white truffle’s time has come. That there was not much stopping the slow death of a delicacy that, like the weather, refused to be controlled by humanity. There was a calm resignation that lacked the expected anger in that soft and windy voice. The same tone you’d use to talk about the futility of maintaining your carefree childhood in perpetuity. At some point we all grow up. At some point something’s got to give.

There was something laughable about the whole business. Something very silly but also very human in how we’ve placed so much value in something because of how difficult it is to obtain, how fleeting its enjoyment, how unattainable for most. Caviar, Saffron, Yubari King Melon. We pay to be seduced by a story where ephemerality is central and in our attempts to prolong it we are, paradoxically, sowing the very seeds of our own disinterest. I don’t write this to say it’s all trivial. Only to comment that much of what we value is really us just romancing ourselves with the intoxicating perfume of stories as we race into oblivion. Why else would we spend the equivalent of several meals to have dogs sniff out a pungent fungus for us to shave ever so lovingly on a plate of plain eggs?