Caviar facts

1. Venetian trading ships first brought caviar to Europe from the Black Sea in the fourteenth century.

2. Caviar remained obscure for another three hundred years. Shakespeare, in his Hamlet, even used the word caviar to refer to something unknown and obscure, Hamlet complains that this play was “caviare to the general.”

3. Galileo was an early fan of caviar.

4. Rabelais, in his tale of Pantegruel, refers to caviar as something ridiculous.

5. Many stocks of sturgeon around the world were exhausted through overfishing and “tragedy of the commons.” Russia has remained the world’s major source of caviar in part through accident. The chaos of WWI, the Bolshevik revolution, and the monopolies and inefficiencies of communism all helped prevent overfishing and preserve sturgeon stocks at critical points in time. This must be counted as one of the economic successes of the Soviet regime.

6. The sturgeon is now an endangered species and caviar movements are tightly regulated. A caviar smuggler can receive up to $20,000 for the contents of a single suitcase, those contents will sell “on the street” for as much as $100,000.

7. The future of caviar lies in fish farming and privately owned sturgeons.

These facts are all from Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy, by Inga Saffron, an excellent book, or you can download it for $10.