Amid the bounteous wealth of reality TV, what I like to call Perilous Reality is up there with the best. Impossibly hard men risking life and limb in pursuit of a pay cheque, glory or the rights to look all stoic and faraway when standing next to a big truck. Well brace yourself, says the pumped-up, gravelly voiceover of Truffle Wars because now “a secret world of foraging has been unearthed!”. Yearghhh!
In Oregon, where black truffles grow, they’re suffering the worst drought in truffling history. Men such as Richey, Justin and Terry, who make their livings from these stinky lil’ black diamonds, have only a 10-week window in which to find and rake up the delicacy, and competition is fierce. Last year, Richey found a dead body dumped on his patch. (No one knows who did it, or why, or if he was a truffle-botherer at all, or just one of the weed growers and meth cookers that share the forest.)
In the truffle race, the rival foragers have differing approaches to their craft. Richey irrigates his patch with a makeshift hose system. Terry employs Linus the pig for help. Justin has sheer weight of capitalism behind him, owning as he does a 230,000 acre patch upon which he deploys a team of crack truffle hunters. Very much the Sainsbury’s Local of the truffle world, Justin hopes to choke out the competition with his economies of scale. “My ultimate goal is to put all the small-time diggers out of business,” he says with a grin.
Justin’s blood truffles aside, there is another awkward little point I can’t ignore. It doesn’t seem like the men of Truffle Wars are actually in all that much peril, despite the show’s enthusiastic attempts to suggest otherwise. “I’ll stay all night out here with Linus if I have to!” puffs Terry through his beard. Will Terry and Linus have to stay all night out there, truffling until gone 10 and at the mercy of any territorial stoners in the vicinity? To remind us of how dangerous this all is, Discovery drops in a murky, shakily shot approximation of what an armed truffle poacher might look like, accompanied by ominous thunderclaps and recaps of scenes shown seconds before. My nerves can’t bear it.
What the men lack in strictly life-endangering career choices, though, they more than make up for in earthy, old-school ruggedness, expressed through stained beards, a deep disregard for clothes that aren’t frayed, and enviable squeamlessness. “Mmmph,” says Terry as he takes a mouthful of dirt off the blade of his knife, after informing us that truffled soil has a delicate palate of aluminium, “No truffles here.”
The question of why shows like Deadliest Catch (perilous crabbing), Ax Men (perilous tree felling) or Swamp People (perilous alligator wrangling) have become so popular is a tough one to crack. A reaction to the increased social standing of women? Doubt it: I give blokes a bit more credit than to think female bus drivers send them crying to the hills. An innate desire for nature worship without looking like a dirty hippy? Possible. For those adverse to the genre, though, look at it like this. Television creates goodies and baddies. At one end of the TV spectrum – glamorous trash – the note of moralistic satisfaction that comes with watching the vacuous lives of the rich and dysfunctional is just the ticket. In TV’s parable, these are the baddies. Conversely, the goodies are people who provide a bit of tradition in a changing world blah blah et cetera and all that. Basically, if you spend all day in an office in Swindon, it’s perfectly natural to get a bit of an entertainment boner over weathered, horizontally mobile types shunning human interaction and, like Richey, spending up to six months at a time in the woods.
Something tells me that such measures aren’t strictly necessary in pursuing the art of truffle husbandry. “I hear people on the outside take selfies. I take pictures of truffles,” says Richie, gazing at a folded snapshot of a black fungus with the look only a man who has truly felt the ecstasy and pain of truffle love could express. Truffling ain’t easy.
Truffle Wars starts tonight, 1 October, 10pm, Discovery
