Books, Naturally
Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy
Inga Saffron. 2002.
Broadway Books, New York.
270 pp., clothbound. $23.95.
I’ve eaten caviar but have not been impressed
with its taste or the oral sensations these brined sturgeon
eggs stimulate. Writer Inga Saffron has a different
take: “Those who crave it will go to extreme lengths
for the sensation of eggs bursting like fireworks in
the mouth. All we need is one taste of caviar and we
are suffused with the whisper of an ocean breeze that
recalls that one primal moment when we, like the prehistoric
sturgeon, were enveloped in the womb of the sea.”
Many share Saffron’s taste for caviar, if not her yearnings for a time when the world was new. Yet, as this fascinating book relates, caviar itself may become a thing of the past. Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy is the story of how gastronomic greed is killing the sturgeon.
The 27 or so sturgeon species represent one of the most ancient families of bony fishes, the Acipenseridae, believed to have existed for 250 million years. Sturgeon nose around in the mud and use their powerful tail to swoosh clams—or just about anything they detect with their four, fat under-chin whiskers—toward their vacuum-like mouth. "Since sturgeon never really stop growing, the older ones tend to be immense,” Saffron reports. With their bodies sheathed in protective bony plates, these bottom-feeding, prehistoric-looking beasts can become huge. The record beluga sturgeon, the largest freshwater fish, weighed 4,570 pounds.
All sturgeon live in the Northern Hemisphere. There are freshwater forms but most species swim from the sea, where they spend most of their lives, to the headwaters of streams to spawn. They return to the sea as fingerlings to feed and grow until they reach maturity at the relatively late age of ten or even 20 years. Subsequently, adult sturgeon make this trek every few years during a long life that can exceed 50 years, unlike most salmon, which die after they spawn. Like salmon, however, sturgeon return to spawn in the same areas in rivers where they hatched. Upstream dams, water pollution, altered river courses, and silted-over spawning sites have created havoc for these great fish. The relentless commercial pursuit of sturgeon for their roe to make caviar for expanding markets of caviar devotees will probably do them in.
I had never before contemplated how one would go about landing a several hundred pound fish, but, as Saffron explains, this was a problem for people when there were still sturgeon that weighed a ton or more to be caught. Cotton fishing nets are ripped by the sturgeon’s sharp bony plates, so netting was not an option until nylon was invented. The bottom-feeding sturgeon don’t snap at their food, so a simple baited “j” hook was not efficient. They could, however, be snagged by their constantly switching tail with a multi-barbed hook, suspended just off the bottom of a river with a float. Sturgeon don’t “run” like a trout when hooked; so sturgeon fishermen just secured the line to a yoke of oxen and dragged the great fish in. This technology “…dominated sturgeon fishing from the Volga to the Danube for centuries.” More recently, one-hook lines were replaced with long lines with many hooks. These snast lines and log weirs turned sturgeon fishing into an industrial process. Today, in the Caspian region where Saffron centers her story, sturgeon are being netted while still at sea or snagged by poacher snast lines as they move up the Volga and other rivers to spawn.
Sturgeon fishing was first about it’s delicious meat as food; roe was discarded. The first unambiguous references to caviar date from medieval times. The Russian Orthodox Church formally sanctioned caviar and sturgeon as food that could be consumed during religious feasts in 1280. Caviar is collected by hand, in an exacting process. Saffron reports: “The operation takes only a few strokes of the knife but unless it is done correctly the caviar will be ruined. Processing caviar requires a quick hand, good judgment, and a certain cold-blooded resolve. The fish should be gasping for breath when the knife rips down her leathery belly…” Ignoring this results in bland and mushy caviar.
Saffron’s account of the last of these great fish is a nail in the coffin for the idea of a resilient and indestructible nature producing an endless bounty. In the late nineteenth century, famed British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley lectured that over-fishing was a unscientific and erroneous fear, a sentiment shared by Sasha the poacher in Saffron’s story: “The Caspian sea is vast… it is impossible to exhaust the sturgeon.” But we have in one area after the next—in the Mediterranean, northern Europe, and North America. The last to go is the Caspian sturgeon fishery, which was once sustained by a Russian-Iranian caviar cartel. That collapsed with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Without controls, superabundant, cheap, good caviar went mainstream, washing through world markets in the 1990s. The sturgeon are now mostly gone, caught in long dragnets in the open Caspian Sea before they make a run for the rivers. Saffron tells how the CITES process—the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species—is failing because, “…CITES does nothing to stop slaughter or overuse…. It is the same story with many plants and animals. Most can’t survive as mass-market commodities unless they are rigorously domesticated and farmed.” Investing in farming a fish that will not realize a return in roe in ten years demands a special breed of investor. Saffron describes some fledgling sturgeon-farming projects, but with a large public yearning for caviar, poachers still set their snast lines, and will continue to do so until the last wild sturgeon is hauled to shore. And caviar becomes merely a memory.
—John Seidensticker, National Zoo Senior Scientist
ZooGoer 32(3)
2003. Copyright 2003 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.
