Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn vos Savant

Marilyn vos Savant lands the punch with the kind of cool, corrective clarity that punctures dinner-party mythology. Truffles aren’t expensive because they’re the Platonic ideal of flavor; they’re expensive because scarcity, labor, and narrative do the heavy lifting. The line works because it refuses the comforting consumer fantasy that price naturally maps onto pleasure. Instead, it reroutes you toward the less romantic mechanics of value: a fungus that’s hard to find, perishable, dependent on specific ecosystems, historically tied to aristocratic tables, and now amplified by an industry that sells mystique as much as aroma.

The subtext is a broader skepticism about “best” as a category. Taste is messy, contextual, and easily coached. Luxury goods thrive on that ambiguity. If you’ve been told truffles are transcendent, you can be primed to experience transcendence - or at least to perform it. Vos Savant’s phrasing (“Know why”) reads like a gentle scolding: be literate in incentives, not just in menu adjectives.

Context matters: coming from a writer known for popular logic and contrarian common sense, this is less foodie snark than an argument for basic economic and psychological hygiene. It’s also a quiet jab at status consumption. The point isn’t that truffles are bad; it’s that the market doesn’t price your palate. It prices rarity, logistics, and the social signal you get to wear when you order them.