
Caviar was a free bar snack - hecubus
https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?3917
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YeahSureWhyNot
I grew up on Caspian shore. Article says shortage began in the 70s but I would
say, from my observation of my father who was a fisherman, even in the 90s
there was a lot of sturgeon in Caspian. We would have buckets of caviar at
home being prepared for sale. The area we lived in was poor but people always
had caviar on the table for breakfast. Also, the article says sturgeon doesn't
need to go upstream in freshwater rivers to lay its eggs but it still does,
the river Samur near us used to have sturgeon going up. Locals would catch
sturgeon and would try to hold the belly hole of the pregnant fish because
caviar would start dripping. Nowadays I rarely hear local fisherman catching
any sturgeon with caviar, only industrial fishery companies are able to do
that and sell 250 gram can of caviar for $100

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jotm
Yeah, when I was really young I'd have caviar regularly, it was cheap, never
thought much of it. Twenty years later, prices seemed insane for what was
basically a weekend of fishing (mostly for the fish meat).

On that note, we had freshwater crabs pretty much every week, one big boiling
pot of them. They were great, nowadays I can't find any.

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rayiner
Caviar is delicious, and also can be relatively sustainable because sturgeon
are amenable to aquaculture. Beluga caviar is actually illegal in the US now,
since it’s listed as an endangered species. But California raises farmed
sturgeon. (The meat itself is delicious, so it’s not being wasted.)

Fish eggs, in general, are very tasty. A favorite Bangladeshi food is fried
hilsha roe: [https://www.cosmopolitancurrymania.com/wp-
content/uploads/20...](https://www.cosmopolitancurrymania.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/08/BeFunky_Hilsa-eggs.jpg.jpg)

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m-p-3
And lobster wasn't a fancy meal until early 20th century
[https://www.history.com/news/a-taste-of-lobster-
history](https://www.history.com/news/a-taste-of-lobster-history)

"lobsters were routinely fed to prisoners, apprentices, slaves and children
during the colonial era and beyond"

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mamon
Makes sense: lobsters are essentially insects, and eating insects, such as
cockroaches is disgusting for most people. I still refuse to eat lobsters and
shrimps for this exact reason: I'm not eating any insects, ever.

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teekert
Some human puts some species under some label.

You: I'm not eating anything under this label as it must be alike!

But in this case insects a lobsters are not even close in the tree of life.
Maybe they indeed look alike a bit. Do you eat feces because it does look a
bit like chocolate?

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Retric
It’s not that far apart Lobsters and insects both belong to the invertebrate
phylum Arthropoda.

If you want to include both spiders which are Chelicerata and grasshoppers
which are Hexapoda that’s Arthropoda.

~~~
phonypc
I guess cows are basically fish then. Both Chordates after all /s

~~~
Retric
Again it depends on the measuring stick. In terms of nutrition costs and fish
are rather similar in comparison to say wheat.

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nradov
When my parents were first married they would be forced to eat abalone due to
running out of money at the end of the month. They had friends who would go
abalone diving on the California coast and give away bags of it.

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randomer666
What's interesting about beluga caviar is that it taste varies a lot. I've
tried illegally caught Russian caviar and then I've tried some caviar from a
sustainable farm and the former was way better for some reason.

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markn951
It’s because the secret ingredient is crime

~~~
buildzr
This explains some things about the legal weed market in my area too.

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mkl
"It takes twenty years for a female beluga to mature, and at that point she
can weigh as much as 1,800 pounds [...]. Such a fish could yield twenty pounds
of eggs [when killed]."

That's got to be one of the least sustainable things I've ever heard of. I
tried caviar once. It didn't taste like much, and I didn't see the point.

~~~
mytailorisrich
It is as sustainable as fishing any other species of fish. Whether caught for
meat or eggs the result is the same. What matters is the quantity fished.

Many luxury foods became so because of culture/fashion trends, btw. For
example, lobster used to be used to fertilise fields and to feed prisoners and
servants in the American North-East.

~~~
mkl
Yeah, that's why I don't buy fish.

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opportune
Maybe I'm just falling victim to corporate propaganda, but I'm pretty sure
wild (Alaskan) salmon is truly sustainably fished, as are sardines and
anchovies

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steve_adams_86
The Alaskan fishery is much like the fishery south of it in BC, where
'sustainable' is a bit of a joke - I think that term is based on taking a
'sustainable' number of the estimated population returning to spawn in rivers.
Alaskan rivers are doing better than BC's, but returns are dwindling and both
governments are consistently shifting baselines on a yearly basis. Every year
quotas are smaller, but so are the populations.

This is something I follow constantly and the numbers are actually terrifying.
Some rivers have _okay_ returns of some species of salmon, but some like
sockeye are at incredibly low numbers. They are by some measures on the brink
of extinction, and many spawning runs are extinct already.

In BC, sockeye returns are currently being tracked daily and the result so far
is that less are returning than _ever_ before, and the amount returning is far
less than the department of fisheries and oceans' lowest estimates. It's an
emergency in my opinion. People shouldn't be eating sockeye.

I'm not sure about sardines and anchovies. I know herring have been seriously
overfished, so I have doubts that anything we fish is sustainable at the
moment. I hope it is.

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ljcn
I don't know much about fish or live near the Pacific, but neither of the
links in my comment (sibling to yours) suggest sockeye is a bad choice. In
fact NE Pacific 'early summer' sockeye is a recommended choice, and many BC
sockeye fisheries have MSC certification.

~~~
steve_adams_86
I know there's certification, but if you look for BC's department of fisheries
and oceans' minutes on the sockeye return, it's dire. As I mentioned, it's
well below their lowest estimates. Their lowest estimates for this year are
even lower than previous years. I've been following this for 7 or 8 years, and
while there are years where the return is better than previous years... It's
still not a good return historically speaking. The sockeye are disappearing.

This year it's not clear why numbers are so low, but a sound guess would be
that the generation spawning this year's returners were largely impacted by
pre-spawn mortalities. Numbers look good going into the river, but they end up
dying before they can spawn. Research into this phenomenon isn't well-funded,
but it's a known problem.

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willmacdonald
When Glasgow was a major force in the ship building world, the unions had a
clause in their contract so they would not fed smoked salmon more than twice a
week.

~~~
Polyisoprene
Saw mill workers in northern Sweden had similar clauses. “No more than 50% of
the salary is to be payed out in salmon.”

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kenneth
I grew up eating caviar (brought back from trips to Russia where it was dirt
cheap in the 90s, not from being rich), and I absolutely love it. It's an
incredible flavor, but definitely an acquired taste.

Like many things, if you grow up eating it, you learn to appreciate it. You
can also learn to appreciate things that you didn't eat as a child, though
that takes much longer as an adult. For me, I learnt to appreciate spicy food
(in particular numbing spicy Sichuan food, and other Asian spices) as an
adult.

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msla
> Caviar was served as a free bar snack, in the hope that as with peanuts, the
> saltiness would encourage drinking.

So it _isn 't_ just the cheap stuff.

I do have a note about the source, though:

> _Salt: A World History_ by Mark Kurlansky

This book vectors the myth that Romans were paid in salt.

This is not true:

[http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-
salary.ht...](http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.html)

(Wikipedia has, of course, been fixed. The printed material never will be.)

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jacksproit
Now there are poachers and counterfeitters.
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/longreads.com/2019/02/12/the-
ca...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/longreads.com/2019/02/12/the-caviar-
con/amp/)

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ajudson
Neat video of Gordon Ramsey visiting a caviar farm in Spain:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88aDJFdUjH4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88aDJFdUjH4)

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zwaps
I always wonder how much of the scarcity is supply+taste vs. conspicious
consumption.

I personally would't pay a lot for caviar of any sort, even though I tried it
quite a few times.

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jlebar
Came here thinking this was about the demise of caviar the app.

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L_226
I enjoy beluga caviar - very expensive for what it is though. A much cheaper
alternatve is (homemade) black olive tapenade - almost as good for similar
usages, and far more sustainable. But I suspect the consumption of caviar is
more about signalling than actual taste anyway.

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huhtenberg
That's like saying that Trabant is a much cheaper alternative to Bentley.
Technically it is... but not quite.

Edit:

I don't know how to be any more clearer here, but "Olive tapenade as a beluga
caviar alternative" is straight from the /shit-the-hn-says department, it's
beyond ridiculous. "Ketchup as a San Marzano tomato alternative."

~~~
pvaldes
Is an interesting comparison. Salty taste and color could relate in some ways,
but tapenade don't has the "exploding in your mouth" part, neither the strong
fish oil taste. Is perfectly good in its own terms even if is not caviar.

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dllthomas
While by no means required, it's not unusual for a tapenade to incorporate
anchovies or anchovy paste which gives some measure of fishiness.

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gwbas1c
> bar snack

I honestly thought this was a link to an article about caviar bars, kind of
like energy bars or chocolate bars.

