Every morning for three months of the year, Lola wakes at 8 and goes hunting. She races past oak trees, running at full speed through a 50-hectare field set in the southern end of the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The daily challenge — to find her elusive prey — never fails to excite Lola. She darts from place to place until faltering at last: 40 minutes into her day, she gets distracted or simply gives in to exhaustion.
Lola is a Brittany spaniel, and beneath her orange-spotted white coat is the agile body of a hunter. But her most important tool is her sense of smell. “Through training, dogs learn to recognize substances in their long-term memory — in this case, the smell of truffles,” says dog trainer Germán Escobar.
A graduate of the University of Buenos Aires who originally hails from Colombia, Escobar has trained Lola and the eight other dogs of the Argentine truffle farm Trufas del Nuevo Mundo, located in Espartillar, a small town of 785 inhabitants.
With 100 million to 300 million olfactory receptors in the nose — humans have only 5 million to 6 million — and a region in their brains dedicated to odor analysis that’s 40 times larger than that of Homo sapiens, trained dogs are able to do what no human can: Track one of the most valuable and desired delicacies, what’s called the “black diamond” of the kitchen, deep underground.
For centuries, truffles were found exclusively in European countries such as Spain, Italy and France, where they grow in the wild. But over the past 50 years, truffle production has experienced an incredible global expansion, thanks to cultivation techniques that have given rise to plantations in far-flung regions. Today, the United States, China, Greece and Turkey as well as countries across the Southern Hemisphere — Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile and Argentina — have emerged as new producers of the famous fungi.
