I FIRST TRIED TRUFFLES IN 2006, at dinner with my wife, Andrea, and two of our friends at Il Pastaio in Beverly Hills. Scanning the specials, I saw a $65 plate of pasta with white truffle. I was a surgeon in California at the time-I'm now retired-and I usually wolfed down most of my meals between procedures. That price tag shocked me, but my ignorance about truffles astonished my friend Michele. She came back to our table with the chef, who carried a container of small, gnarled nuggets.
"Take a whiff of this," he said. When I leaned in, I was hit by a unique aroma-earthy and woody, but also a little salty. The box, he said, held roughly 15 to 20 pounds of truffles. It cost him $30,000, and it was all he could get for the season. He went to the kitchen and came back with a plate of pasta with shaved truffles on top. "Enjoy," he said.
The flavour was indescribably rich, unlike anything I'd eaten before. One bite was all I needed to understand why hunters have foraged for these elusive subterranean fruits for centuries, and why chefs pay $30,000 just to buy one box of them. I would spend the next 17 years of my life trying to grow my own.
When our truffle journey began, Andrea and I had 2.5 acres of land in the Okanagan (we'd bought it as a seasonal residence in 1999), the funds for our shared curiosity and the understanding that truffles had never been successfully harvested in the region. Cultivating truffles is a labour of patience. They are the underground fruit of fungus that grows at the base of inoculated host trees, including hazelnut and oak, and they usually take at least seven to 12 years to emerge after the trees are planted. There are a variety of species-Tuber magnatum is known as the white Alba truffle, and Tuber melanosporum is the black Périgord truffleand growing them is an imperfect science.
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Esta historia es de la edición September 2023 de Maclean's.
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So You've Been Hacked - A new generation of ultra-sophisticated cybercriminals are targeting governments, corporations, hospitals and libraries and laying bare how ill-equipped Canada is to fight back
A new generation of ultra-sophisticated cybercriminals are targeting governments, corporations, hospitals and libraries and laying bare how ill-equipped Canada is to fight back.On a July morning in 2022, Brad Hynes, the IT manager for the town of St. Mary's in southwestern Ontario, was backing up the town's computer systems when things went haywire. File names became unintelligible strings of characters. Desktop icons went blank. File after file was impossible to open, a string of digital duds. The background wallpaper on Hynes's screen disappeared, replaced by the red-and-black logo of a Russian ransomware gang called LockBit. A line of all-caps text appeared: All your important files are stolen and encrypted!
Bill of Health - I spent years with excruciating hip pain, languishing in Canada's health-care queue. I finally paid for private surgery-in Lithuania.
My hip pain started around 2015, when I was in my mid-30s. It began as stiffness, then the odd pinch or tweak. I live with my wife, Barbara, and our three kids on an acreage in Sturgeon County, Alberta, where we raise a handful of cows and some chickens. Our lives are very active. I'm also a maintenance supervisor at a nearby provincial park. That's a physical job, too-overseeing buildings, outhouses and campsites. I'm not exactly used to sitting still, so when my hip started to hurt, I pushed through it. I figured it was something minor and did some extra stretches. Instead, it got worse.
Green Scene - Montreal's Théâtre de Verdure stages plays and musical performances against a naturally beautiful backdrop
Théâtre de Verdure is a setting straight out of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: a thespian's paradise in the middle of a lush woodland. Since 1956, the open-air stage has occupied an island in the middle of Montreal's Parc La Fontaine, exposing park-goers to regular, accessible (read: free) and dazzling productions.
Log Off To Find Love - Apps have gamified meeting and mating-and affected our social skills for the worse. The real future of dating is offline.
In 2017, after being single for a few years, I wanted to get back into the dating game. I was newly sober at the time, so I wasn’t super-confident about venturing into my local bar scene in London, Ontario. Instead, I leapt into the world of digital dating via Bumble, which, back then, required women to send the first message. I thought, That’s feminist. I’m a feminist. Let’s try it! My first few months online provided me with an emotionally exhausting education.
"I escaped Gaza and sent my family to Egypt. Now, my goal is to reunite with them in Canada."
Bombs destroyed my neighbourhood and killed my loved ones. I hope my family and I can find refuge in Quebec.
TIDAL WAVE
Susan Lapides chronicles her family's summers in a tiny New Brunswick fishing town
THE NORTHERN FRONT
In Ontario's hinterlands, a battle is brewing between First Nations, prospectors and the provincial government over a multi-billion-dollar motherlode of metals. Inside the fight for the Ring of Fire.
THE CULTURE WAR IN THE CLASSROOM
Several provincial governments now mandate parental consent for kids to change pronouns in Schools. Who gets to decide a child's gender?
THE JACKPOT GENERATION
Canada is in the midst of the greatest wealth transfer of all time, as some $1 trillion passes from boomers to their millennial kids. How an inheritance-based economy will transform the country.
My Child-Free Choice
For a long time, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to become a parent. The climate crisis clinched my decision.
