The Trouble With Truffles

Truffles are harvested in France and Italy with the aid of either female pigs or truffle dogs, both of which are able to detect the strong smell of mature truffles underneath the surface of the ground, with dogs being preferred by most commercial truffle hunters because they don’t tend to eat the truffles they unearth. But if you’re just looking for a quick snack and not a career, you might want to go with the pig.

Where “truffle dogs” require lengthy training, pigs sniff out the fungal delicacy naturally–and enthusiastically–due to truffles’ production of a substance called androstenone. As luck would have it, androstenone is the potent pheromone found in the saliva of a male pig which will cause a female to immediately assume a mating stance. The cunning trick of nature is a fortunate phenomenon for worldwide lovers of the tasty delicacy, as humans’ inferior noses are unable to detect the truffles before they have passed their peak. It’s presumably less than satisfying for the pig, who does all the work but gets neither the sex nor the truffle.