If you don’t spend your lunchtime slathering hot dogs in caviar like our beloved fancy asshole Drew Magary, you might not know how it’s harvested. Most caviar comes from dead fish; fishermen slit open the female sturgeon, remove that precious roe, and then sell the fish for meat (read more yummy details at Slate, if you’re into that). Why can’t they harvest the roe and keep the fish alive? One U.K. farm claims it can.
KC Caviar out of Leeds bills itself as the world’s leading “ethical and sustainable” caviar producer. The father-son duo who runs the farm says that’s because they employ a “socially acceptable caviar harvesting process” which doesn’t kill the fish. KC Caviar performs what the BBC calls a “massage” to force the eggs out of the sturgeon, then returns the fish to its pool, they say, with no harm done. KC says while other caviar producers’ no-kill methods still harm the fish and cause premature death, theirs causes no stress or damage to the fish.
I spend a bit of time Googling “forced stripping,” which is the process fish biologists, caviar producers, and fish breeds use to massage eggs out of the animals. Again, take a look for yourself, if you’re into that and haven’t eaten lunch yet. It is... something else.
But KC takes its no-harm policy even further: Customers can track the fish that produced their caviar. A code on each package corresponds to a microchipped fish whose identity can be retrieved at KC’s website, providing “living proof that this process is totally harmless to the sturgeon.” (Also, the fish bios are, um, about what you’d expect. Here’s one for a sturgeon named Layla: “She is a happy fish who loves swimming round her tank.”)
This is one culinary-ethical dilemma I don’t have to worry about, as caviar isn’t a staple of my diet the way it is for Drew Magary or Russian oligarchs.