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Hi ,
The New Year brings special food traditions around the globe – tamales in Mexico, soba noodles in Japan, black-eyed peas and greens in the American South.
In my house, we eat caviar. My partner treats me to one tin of caviar every year. We order it from a deli in New York City, and it arrives overnight in an iced box with tiny blini and a tub of crème fraîche. We take out our mother-of-pearl spoon, procure a nice loaf of bread, set the tin on ice, and pour the champagne. New Year's Eve is my favorite holiday, and this indulgence makes it feel even more special.
These tasty pearls of salt-cured fish eggs historically came from sturgeon in the Caspian and Black seas. But I recently learned that today more than 99% of the global caviar supply comes not from the former Soviet bloc but from farms, largely in China, because sturgeon populations have collapsed from overfishing.
One of the few exceptions to that rule is caviar produced from wild-caught sturgeon and paddlefish in the Mississippi River Basin.
I'd never heard of caviar from the Mississippi River, so, of course, I started reporting on it. I found a story of natural resource management, of money, of evolving tastes. Like the sturgeon, paddlefish face the risk of overfishing because of their valuable eggs and slow breeding. But each state manages the species differently, even as the waters where they live flow through borders and jurisdictions.
Paddlefish are biological cousins to sturgeon, and some purists say "caviar" must come from sturgeon, while everything else is just roe. But as one caviar pro told me: "It is really delicious and tastes and plays like caviar."
I reported this story for the Gravy podcast and thought readers of the Desk's newsletter would appreciate it. My work at the Desk informed my reporting and made me think about management of this resource at a basin scale.
You can listen to the full piece here:
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