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The Debate
On Caviar Economics:
Worth Its Weight In Gold?
by Darren Dahl
Published: September 2004
My throat dry with city soot, I steal away to my favorite
neighborhood haunt for a cool pint and a snack. Scooping
up a handful of complimentary ‘Albany Beef’
(caviar, or fish eggs, plucked from a Hudson sturgeon),
I pop the salty, snappy berries onto my tongue, savoring
the flavors as I marinate them in my mouth. They then
go down with a gulp and a grin. Hmmm. Caviar dreams
you say? Hardly. Try New York, circa 1800, where the
Hudson River teems with schools of American Sturgeon
so vast that saloons serve the thirst-stimulating roe
free-of-charge while children shelve pricey cowhide
and pigskin balls to playfully boot around the discarded
skulls and carcasses littering the streets. Today, New
York caviar sales tell a different fish story. The finest
imported caviar runs nearly a hundred dollars an ounce
or, by comparison, you can trade four ounces of beluga
‘black gold’ for an ounce of the shiny yellow
metallic stuff. And that’s the trouble with shopping
too much at Mother Nature’s free market.
“Those glistening black globules are a culinary
Rorschach that unleashes our deeply held notions about
wealth, luxury, and life.”
- Inga Saffron
With its bony armor and blunted snout, the hulking
sturgeon is like the stegosaurus of the sea. In fact,
sturgeons have outlasted their land-based contemporaries,
thriving on the bottoms of rivers, lakes, and coastal
waters of the Northern Hemisphere ever since the last
dinosaur choked on comet-dust. Among the twenty-five
known species of sturgeon, certain varieties can live
to be octogenarians, adding up to twenty five hundred
pounds to their fifteen-foot-long bulk. Like humans,
Sturgeon develop slowly and reproduce relatively late
in life, reaching sexual maturity between the ages of
fifteen and twenty. But when a full-blown adult sturgeon
breeds, it can be a prolific experience; a beluga caught
in 1908 yielded nine hundred and ninety pounds of eggs,
a crop that might net upwards of a million and a half
dollars in today’s market, perhaps even more through
a spirited Ebay auction.
“Caviar should be kept as simple as possible
and eaten in decent volumes. People will spend sums
of money on wine without any hesitation; it should
be the same with caviar.”
- Babek Hadi
The love affair between humans and caviar dates back
at least as far as 2400 B.C., where carvings unearthed
near the Sakkara Pyramid depict Egyptians experimenting
with salting and pickling fish meat and roe not as luxury
items, but as sustenance. Medieval nobles in nations
like Russia, China, Denmark, France, and England anointed
the sturgeon a ‘royal fish’; only the gentry
enjoyed the right to sink their hooks and teeth, into
sturgeon flesh. By the 1800’s, the United States
monopolized ninety percent of the global caviar trade,
annually combing sixty thousand pounds of eggs from
Lake Michigan alone. But, by the early twentieth century,
greedy over-fishing and the careless souring of natural
habitats resulted in the near extinction of the American
sturgeon, thus turning the focus to the burgeoning of
the Caspian Sea caviar economy.
The Guinness Book awards the Caspian Sea the record
of World’s Largest Lake. Nourished by more than
one hundred Russian, Kazakhstani, Turkmen, Azerbaijani,
and Iranian rivers, the Caspian Sea is also Nature’s
ideal petri dish for breeding sturgeon. Five species
stalk the Caspian sediment: Beluga (giant or great sturgeon),
Russian (which produces osetra caviar), Stellate (sevruga
caviar), Ship, and Persian. Indeed, even caviar’s
linguistic roots can be angled from the Persian word
“khav-yar”, meaning “cake of strength.”
The Caspian was once so chock-full of sturgeon that
annual hauls from the late 19th and early 20th centuries
regularly tipped the scales at over twenty thousand
tons, and billions of rubles, seemingly enough to satiate
every gourmand’s appetite for a lifetime. But
when someone discovered that the Caspian could be tapped
(and barreled) for another ‘black gold’,
the thankless economics of supply and demand would deal
the sturgeon an all-too-familiar blow.
“The roe of the Russian mother sturgeon has
probably been present at more important international
affairs than have all the Russian dignitaries of history
combined.”
- James Beard
Like the Americans before them, the Soviet Russians
(and now the post-Soviets and Iranians) have learned
a poignant lesson in supply-side economics. Over the
past two decades, an array of mangled industrial and
commercial decisions have decimated ninety percent of
the beluga sturgeon fleet. Damaging activities include
the contamination of Caspian waters from an invasive
cocktail of refined petroleum by-products mixed with
sewage and fertilizer runoff; the damming of the Caspian’s
primary tributary, the Volga River, which blocks eighty-five
percent of the beluga’s upstream spawning grounds;
and, perhaps most sinister, the unchecked explosion
in the quarter billion dollar black market trade in
caviar that outstrips legal exports ten to one. Russian
officials estimate that in 1995, poachers gutted practically
every sturgeon unlucky enough to migrate to the Volga.
The environment has become so unbalanced that legitimate
Russian fisherman can no longer find enough fish to
meet their sanctioned quotas. Thankfully, recent efforts
have begun to blow a fresh whiff of hope to help ease
the stench of the past.
1998 marked the first good news a sturgeon ever heard
when the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered
Species (CITES) recognized all Caspian Sea sturgeon
species as internationally protected resources, requiring
every export to have an identification permit detailing
the grade, country of origin, and the year of catch.
Under the CITES umbrella, customs agents at New York’s
JFK airport seize illegal imports on a weekly basis
- over thirty one thousand pounds of caviar since 1998.
Despite efforts like these to curtail smuggling, demand
for caviar continues to rise off the charts (wealthy
populations in the EU, Switzerland, Japan, and the US
account for ninety-five percent of the multi-million
dollar market), and the nets thrown out by the export
police contain many loopholes. So, using CITES as a
platform, a new campaign is being waged to save the
sturgeon – this time, targeting the consumer.
“Some people wanted champagne and caviar when
they should have had beer and hot dogs.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
Textbook economics dictates that supply will increase
to meet heightened demand, and when it can’t,
price skyrockets. In the beluga sturgeon case study,
a smuggler can cash-in a single fish’s roe for
a month’s salary. When establishing the Caviar
Emptor campaign (www.caviaremptor.com) and slogan in
2000 (“Let the Connoisseur Beware”), the
combined leadership of the National Resources Defense
Council, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and SeaWeb
not only leveraged a clever pun, but went after those
of us demanding nothing less than crisp “malossol
beluga” (Russian for “a little salt”)
by pulling a bit of bait and switch on the black market.
The Caviar Emptor program strives for two primary objectives:
highlight the dire circumstances facing the Caspian
sturgeon and spur their recovery through conservation,
aqua-culturing (fish farming) and, just as importantly,
educate consumers about the delicious, and guiltless,
alternative caviar options.
“One can be unhappy before eating caviar, even
after, but at least not during.”
– Alexander Korda
Although the beluga remains the flavor of choice for
discriminating palates, North American suppliers have
re-introduced an entire menu’s worth of mouth-watering
substitutes for imported caviar like: lake sturgeon
(comparable in size/color to beluga), hackleback (native
to the Mississippi/Missouri rivers), paddlefish (also
called ‘spoonbills’), “choupique”
(Cajun for bowfin), Chinook and Coho salmon (gorgeous
orange, juice-filled globs), trout, whitefish (American
Golden), flying fish (for you sushi fans), and even
lobster roe. These American choices not only burst with
the similar colors and distinct buttery flavors as their
Persian cousins, but ring up significantly lower prices
at the register. At Zabar’s on Broadway, a two-ounce
tin of Caspian beluga costs the same as thirty ounces
of Pacific salmon roe. Yet, Zabar's sell five times
more imported caviar than domestic stock. Depending
on your circumstances, and your appetite, you do the
math.
“Caviar...the pause that says I love myself.”
- New York Magazine
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 protagonist, Yossarian,
seeks his discharge from the Air Force by proving his
insanity, merely confirming his sanity through his efforts.
Heller’s novel’s title has become synonymous
with paradoxical reasoning; contradictory logic that
just might apply to the economics of caviar –
the buying frenzy escalates as the price of caviar climbs
– proving that it’s neither the supply nor
demand that makes the stuff taste so damn good. Fortunately,
with conservation efforts put forth by organizations
like Caviar Emptor and the eco-friendly breeding by
entrepreneurial aqua-farmers, the near future seems
bright for the sturgeon. In the meantime, while our
domestic supply stabilizes, what are we to do about
our caviar addictions – go cold turkey?
Let
the debate begin.
References:
“Roe to discovery - American caviar now rivals
Russia's in quality”
by Isabel Forgang, NY Daily News – August 12,
2002
www.nydailynews.com/08-12-2002/city_life/ story/
10204p-9136c.html
Wine Spectator Magazine Online, November 30,
1999
http://www.winespectator.com/Wine/Archives/Show_Article/
0,1275,2447,00.html
What’s Cooking America
http://whatscookingamerica.net/caviar.htm
Caviar Emptor
http://www.caviaremptor.com/
WorldStar Conservation
http://www.worldstar.com/~dlarson/conserva.htm
Sterling Caviar
www.sterlingcaviar.com
Paramount Caviar
www.paramountcaviar.com
Sunburst Trout Company
http://www.sunbursttrout.com/our_story.html
Zabars
www.zabars.com
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