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

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...

And lobster wasn't a fancy meal until early 20th century 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"

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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

Now there are poachers and counterfeitters. https://www.google.com/amp/s/longreads.com/2019/02/12/the-ca...

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

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.

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

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.

> bar snack

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