On death roe: Swetha Sivakumar on the cruelty of caviar
The farming and harvesting are brutal, but what is perhaps worst is that most people will quietly admit they don’t even like the taste.
In order to harvest fish eggs, one must gut the fish and scoop them out. This is bad enough. In the case of the sturgeon, the “mother” of caviar, things get arguably worse.
The sturgeon dates back more than 250 million years, to the age of the earliest dinosaurs. It has survived Chicxulub and climate shifts. Now, intensive farming threatens to wipe it out.
Many of these fish live painful lives in captivity, being scanned, injected and operated on for their roe.
In the wild, they are so endangered that IUCN (the International Union for Conservation of Nature) features all 26 remaining species on its Red List, with about two-thirds of these listed as critically endangered.
Among the most endangered of these is the beluga sturgeon, which yields the world’s most expensive caviar. (Prices start at about ₹20,000 for 30 gm.)
Native to the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the rivers flowing into them, in Russia, the beluga is also the largest of its species. It can grow to a length of 20 ft and weight up to 1.6 tonnes. Its eggs are large (about 3 mm in diameter), inky black, and prized for their buttery flavour.
The Kaluga, next in size, grows to about 18 ft and 1 tonne, and is considered the next best thing. Smaller egg varieties include the Osetra and Sevruga, which have an intense, briny flavour.
Sturgeons are so large and well-protected, with spiked bodies that act almost as a kind of armour, that they are still very difficult to catch in the open ocean. They are bottom-feeders, and stay close to the floor, hoovering up crustaceans, molluscs and wobbly invertebrates for food. Even when they are caught, their weight and sharp protrusions often let them rip through nets.
But… these fish swim upriver to spawn. And so, the one time they are really vulnerable is also when they are most valuable on the market. As they leap out of the water on their upriver journey, they can be targeted with harpoons and nets.
This is how the fish were originally caught. Back then, the roe was an insignificant byproduct. They were sought-after for the massive amounts of meat they yielded.
The roe, in fact, was difficult to handle, the eggs breaking easily, and so it was salted and pressed into “cakes” called payusnaya in Russian. This was a humble food eaten by peasants.
Fin dining
Refrigeration turned a range of foods into status symbols. By the mid-1800s, it had given the once-humble sturgeon roe a complete makeover.
Seemingly overnight, caviar became an exorbitant delicacy. Companies began to sell small, gleaming tins of pearly, intact eggs, salted only slightly, to allow their natural flavours to shine through.
Professing a fondness for this delicate, rare, hard-to-preserve food became a power move. At fine European restaurants and hotels, it began to be paired, on menus, with champagne.
To enhance its allure, rituals were created around it. Caviar was only served using spoons made of mother-of-pearl or (ironically) ivory. All other materials we said to mar the eggs’ delicate flavour.
As demand grew, sturgeon populations fell, particularly since these large fish mature slowly, often taking up to 20 years to reach adulthood. And production grew across the northern hemisphere, from Hamburg in Germany to the entire 2,000-km stretch of East Coast from Savannah to Maine.
In Russia and Iran, countries that still dominate the global caviar market, trading norms were reframed to prevent overharvesting. It didn’t help. Numbers continued to plummet.
Most caviar companies now depend on farmed sturgeon for their supply. (The most aggressive of these farms, incidentally, are now in China.)
There are a lot of awful things about sturgeon-farming. The fish are no longer killed for the roe; they are operated on, stitched up, and rereleased to make more.
Kept in open-water enclosures within oceans or lakes, they often live alongside their own waste, developing diseases.
New fish-farming techniques such as RAS (the recirculating aquaculture system), where water is continuously purified, can help, but they involve an additional cost and so are currently used in less than 2% of fish farming in Europe.
Sturgeon farmers invest, instead, in machines for ultrasounds and biopsies, so that each batch of eggs can be harvested at exactly the right time. (Immature eggs lack flavour, while fully ripe ones are too soft, causing losses during processing.)
The fish are often injected with hormones to make them mature faster.
It’s an incredibly cruel process overall. And what bothers me most, perhaps, is that many people will quietly confess they don’t even like the taste.
(To reach Swetha Sivakumar with questions or feedback, email upgrademyfood@gmail.com)
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