Meet the truffle-hunters of Baghdad
Chloe Cornish writes for Financial Times:
Night falls and men in long tunics line a road heading west. Illuminated by car headlights, they sell what look like piles of muddy rocks. Welcome to Baghdad, where February is desert truffle season.
My first taste of this delicacy is with a Baghdad provincial council member. As Nouri Jassim, a Sufi, enumerates the province’s failings just as he counts prayer beads — electricity, sewage, housing shortage, corruption, unemployment — I tuck into boiled truffle slices. A little gritty with fine sand, they are nonetheless delicious.
Their pursuit can be dangerous. Truffle-hunters sometimes stumble into areas littered with mines from Iraq’s more than three decades of war. Three brothers collecting truffles in the mountains north of Baghdad were reportedly kidnapped and killed this month in a suspected Isis attack.
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