Truffles: The Most Expensive Food in the World.European white truffles can sell as much as $ 3,600 per pound, fungi and their peers the world's most expensive food. One of two pounds of truffles recently sold for over $ 300,000. All this has led to organized crime in the trafficking of truffles, creating a black market and leads to theft of two truffles and the truffle dogs of great-smelling. Add to that the influx of Chinese truffles bottom - posing as their European cousins - and you have trouble with truffles. Lesley Stahl reports.The following is a script of "The most expensive food in the world" which was issued on January 8, 2012. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Ira Rosen, producer.
Just a couple of black truffle shavings France - known as black diamond - can cost hundreds of dollars at a restaurant in Paris. Italian white truffles can cost more than three times.
Truffles are a delicacy luxury, delicious - some say an aphrodisiac - and, ounce for ounce, the most expensive food in the world. If you go to France and Italy, as we did, you quickly learn that the truffles are threatened because they are increasingly scarce. They are trafficked like drugs, stolen by criminals and less threatened by imports from China.
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Lesley Stahl: We found one yet? Where, where, where? He found one? Oh, my God. Oh, the smell.
In the beautiful Italian province of Perugia, truffle hunters roam the icy hills with their dogs trained to sniff these fungi bumps when ripe, one by one as they have for centuries.
Stahl: Wow!
Truffles grow wild, underground, usually at the base of an oak tree. They used to use pigs, but they ate the truffles.
Olga Urbani, very rich American people only see the nose on the table in an elegant restaurant. Do not watch this. Now you know why they are expensive, right?
Olga Urbani may be the only person in the world that is searching for truffles in a fur coat and a long lasting tan Caribbean, but in the business of the nose, you can do almost what you want. His company, Urbani, controls 70 percent of commercial truffles in the world.
Urbani: When you find the truffle, which is like having a miracle.
Stahl: Other!
Other countries such as the U.S. have tried to cultivate truffles, with limited success. It is the combination of European red soil and wet summers that produce a rich, earthy flavor. The price of these truffles command causes the hunters act like gold mines.
Stahl: So this is $ 1,000? Right there is $ 1,000 ...
And that is why hunters value their dogs more than almost anything!
Urbani (with farmers): He said: "I really love my wife, but the dog ..."
These truffles will go right to the factory Urbani, where they are washed, sorted and whether frozen or canned - fresh or flown fancy restaurants like DB Bistro Modern New York, home of the $ 150 hamburger smothered with truffles. A chip of the few over the dough can be run even more. In the year 2010 at an auction in Macau, this two-pound white truffle sells for $ 330,000, a record.
Stahl: It's not like farming. People do not put a seed in the ground. And they are a fungus.
Urbani: Yes, they are underground fungi, yes.
Stahl: So the farmer cannot really make it happen.
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