The following is excerpted from Truffle Boy: My Unexpected Journey Through the Exotic Food Underground by Ian Purkayastha. The book, published this year by Hachette Books, is the basis for the author's interview with Nam Kiwanuka on The Agenda in the Summer.

Twelve miles out from the Empire State Building, as you rattle across the overpass from the New Jersey Turnpike toward Newark Airport, you can look left and see a double-height warehouse with letters on its facade that spell out UNITED CARGO. The u fell off once, and every time I saw NITED CARGO, I thought about the truth of my industry, the food business. It’s benighted: dark, shadowy, shady.

That warehouse is Newark’s cargo terminal, where night flights from around the world bring goods to the Tri-state area, home to twenty million Americans with a collective economic output greater than that of all but a dozen countries. The Newark cargo terminal is a global rendezvous point for the flat-world economy, a depot for valuable commodities, a clearinghouse for perishable freight that wouldn’t withstand slower passage upon the high seas. Inside I’ve seen pallets of iPhones from China, long-stem Ecuadorian roses, Ferraris, caged live birds, whole king salmon from Alaska’s Copper River, and human corpses that arrive in giant Styrofoam coolers and are met by hearse-driving funeral directors.

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I know Newark’s cargo terminal well because New York is a hungry city, and my job is to supply chefs with the exotic delicacies they use to seduce their customers. Black and white truffles, caviar, Japanese Wagyu beef, Spanish pata negra from abroad. Golden chanterelles, matsutake, and porcini foraged from the Pacific Northwest. Ramps, pawpaws, and wild ginseng harvested from the ferny hollows of the Appalachian Mountains. The kind of products I sell fly into Newark like first-class passengers, the one percent of the food world, and within hours they are being prepared in the finest restaurants in New York City—the Michelin-starred, New York Times–celebrated, Best Restaurants in the World list–topping showplaces run by celebrity chefs like Daniel Boulud, David Chang, and Thomas Keller.

What I sell are known in the industry as specialty foods. They represent a niche within the already small niche of grade-A, hand-selected, thoughtfully curated local/seasonal/organic/artisanal food you find on ambitious menus. The specialty foods game is fierce because the stakes are high, and New York is where you can make it big if everything comes together just right—or lose everything if it doesn’t.

At the height of white truffle season, which runs from October to New Year’s Day, I can sell fifty pounds a week. In volume, that’s nothing compared to the fifty pounds of potatoes a restaurant might use for a single meal service. But fifty pounds of truffles amounts to $100,000 wholesale. Even jaded chefs perk up when I walk in with a basket of truffles. I’m horrible for a restaurant’s food costs, but chefs will pay anything for my product. Nothing in the kitchen, with the possible exceptions of cocaine or 20-year-old Pappy Van Winkle, makes a chef hornier.

Other companies will say that they have the best truffles, or caviar, or mushrooms, or olive oil, or whatever. What you need to understand is that the specialty foods market is rife with fraud. Adulteration is rampant. Counterfeiting is commonplace. Things like substituting worthless Chinese truffles indistinguishable in appearance from true European black truffles but lacking all flavour. Caviar treated with borax, which gives the beads extra pop but can melt your liver. Foie gras dyed yellow because that’s how chefs think it should look. “Italian” olive oil that is actually produced by agribusiness giants in Turkey or Greece, shipped across the Adriatic in tanker ships, funneled into pretty glass bottles, and labeled EXTRA-VIRGIN as if it came from some ancient Tuscan grove. And it’s not just a luxury-food issue. Even the most basic ingredients in your pantry are likely adulterated. Preground black pepper is doped with ground olive pits. Salt is cut with talc and other fillers. Eater beware: The food industry is like the Wild West. My goal from the start has been to change that—still is.

But that’s to come. For now my point is simply that the belly of New York rumbles mightily, and the city devours every morsel that reaches its greedy maw. Nothing is too expensive or too exotic, and my job is to scout the world for the most delicious foods known to man.

It’s also worth knowing that the first time I went to Nited Cargo to pick up a shipment of truffles from Italy, I was seventeen years old. That’s when I moved to New York with a dream. Three years earlier I had found my calling at my grandparents’ cabin in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas. That April day I walked out the back door with my uncle Jared, and he taught me how to forage for morels. The next year I learned about truffles.

Truffles, if you don’t know about them, are the ultimate mushrooms. They come out of the ground damp and lumpy, looking like clods of dirt. The French call them “diamonds of the kitchen,” because they are rare and because beneath their drab exterior they contain an inner mystery, a unique aroma that no one can fully describe. It encompasses fragrances of mushrooms and Parmesan cheese, garlic and chlorophyll, cured meats and herbs, the smells of the soil and the seasons, of intimacy and rebirth, the complex and elusive scent of human desire.

Using savings pooled from three Christmases, I bought a kilo of truffles off the French version of eBay and sold to chefs in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Overnight, I became a teenage truffle dealer.

From the book Truffle Boy by Ian Purkayastha. Copyright © 2017 by Ian Purkayastha. Reprinted by permission of Hachette Books, New York, NY. All rights reserved.