They didn't say it tasted no different from olive oil, they said it was olive oil, with artificial flavoring added. Which is true. Tang is artificially flavored water. That doesn't mean it's no different from water.
> "Despite the name, most truffle oil does not contain even trace amounts of truffle; it is olive oil mixed with 2,4-dithiapentane, a compound that makes up part of the smell of truffles and is as associated with a laboratory as Californian food is associated with local and organic ingredients. Essentially, truffle oil is olive oil plus truffles’ “disconcerting” smell."
That implies that (most) truffle oil is only different to olive oil in smell, which is a big difference from oil that tastes of either real or artificial truffel flavouring.
Aside from differing levels in what you can directly sense with your tongue– Sweet, Salty, Bitter, Sour, and Glutamates (umami), which we would all consider to be 'seasoning' elements (not broaching the topic of different chemical effects, such as with capsaicin)– the primary difference between any two foods is how they smell, which is why when you have a totally blocking cold, you can easily tell if something is too salty, but you couldn't say what herbs were used in it.
Consider a lime lollipop and a cherry lollipop with the same ratio of sugar base to whatever acid they were using for sourness. Going strictly by your sense of taste, maybe because of Anosmia, they would be utterly indistinguishable. The flavoring components, however, which really just give the pops a scent, are what makes the lime one taste like lime, and the cherry one taste like... whatever cherry lollipops are supposed to taste like. Our brain combines the tongue sensations and smells (and arguably, its appearance, mouthfeel and sound) to create our perception of something's 'flavor.'
This is why seasoning food, especially with salt, is important. It's not going to change the intensity of the brownness of a steak, or the freshness of an ear of corn, but it stimulates the tongue in a way that makes our brain much more aware of what we're smelling. It turns up the volume on the existing flavors, as if to say "hey! pay attention to what you're smelling, because it's coming from what's in your mouth." (I imagine this evolved from a combination of our need to seek nutrition, as well as our need to detect poisons.) Lacking stimulation on your tongue, foods come across as flat and uninteresting.
I'm sure our bathrooms would be designed very differently if our brains were worse at making the distinction between what we're just smelling, and what was in our mouths.
> They didn't say it tasted no different from olive oil, they said it was olive oil, with artificial flavoring added. Which is true.
Of course, "real" truffle oil is also oil from some other source (usually olive), with natural flavoring (consisting primarily of the same actual compound in the "fake" version) added (IIRC, often by proximity rather than direct contact, which keeps a lot of the elements of truffle flavor that are present in whole truffles out of the oil, achieving a result not very much unlike the "fake" truffle oil in how it differs from the flavor of whole truffles.)
Yeah. Not really different from the fake stuff IMHO.
Real, unadulterated truffle oil, if it even does exist today, is extraordinarily rare: like, more difficult than getting fresh truffles. This is largely because truffles simply don't transfer their flavor to oil well.
I'm a culinary school trained former chef that worked in some pretty high end restaurants and I've never seen it in person. Neither did Daniel Patterson with the NYT when he tried to track some down. What I have seen a lot of is the usual sort of truffle oil with little bits of dried truffle in it for show though.
