Name: Why Caviar Is So Expensive | So Expensive
Uploaded: 2025-12-28T16:22:33.000Z
Duration: 5 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Caviar is one of the most expensive foods in the world, selling for up to $35,000 per kilo.

It's revered and relished by aristocrats around the globe.

Turns out caviar wasn't always so valuable.

In the 19th century, sturgeon species in the US were so common that that there were accounts of caviar being offered in saloons for free.

In Europe, fishermen were feeding the eggs to their pigs or just leaving them on the beach to spoil.

Similar to true champagne, caviar doesn't come from just anywhere.

To get the real thing, it has to be eggs from a sturgeon.

There are 27 species around the world in North America, Europe and Asia.

In this case, sturgeon will die out because humans are over harvesting the populations and destroying their habitats.

In 2010, the International Union for Conservation of Nature placed 18 species of sturgeon on its red list for threatened spec, making the sturgeon the most endangered group of species on earth.

On one hand, they can help protect the sturgeon from further population decline.

it's illegal to fish endangered sturgeon species or import their eggs.

On the other hand, the more rare caviar becomes, the more we can't get enough of it.

There's actually an economic idea that explains this.

it describes how rarity increases value of the item, even though the item itself has never changed.

Sturgeon can weigh up to several thousand pounds and produce hundreds of pounds of roe at a time.

The world record belongs to a beluga sturgeon that weighed 2,520 pounds and yielded 900 pounds of roe.

Today, she'd be worth about a half a million dollars.

It wasn't until around the 20th century when these freshwater fish and their eggs became a rare commodity.

Pollution poisoned their waters and dams blocked their spawning grounds upstream.

They had nowhere to reproduce and continued to be overfished for their meat and roe.

On top of that, it takes eight to 20 years for a female to sexually mature.

Depending on the species, she can produce millions of eggs at a time.

But the odds are that only one one will survive to adulthood.

In the end, the sturgeon population just couldn't keep up with that demand.

And their coveted eggs became the jewels of the luxury food scene.

Today, caviar imports and exports are closely regulated in the US Which Is partly why it's so expensive.

Every single egg, every one of these eggs is taken off by hand.

Now, remember, we're dealing with a raw seafood endangered species.

So it's basically like eating and dealing with, you know, edible elephant tusks.

And that's why today, the majority of caviar comes from sturgeon farms.

Little did I know that by 2011, all wild caviar would become illegal on the planet.

When I started, there were six farms in the world raising sturgeon and only two producing caviar in the world.

Now there's 2,000 farms around the world.

One farm in particular in China, called Kaluga Queen, produces 35% of all the world's caviar are there is harvested with the classic Russian and Iranian technique, which involves killing the fish and then extracting the eggs.

Other farms are exploring a different technique which doesn't involve killing the fish.

The fish are injected with a hormone that triggers their urge to release eggs.

Farmers have been doing this for many years, but not to get caviar, just to produce more fish.

It wasn't until recently that people started canning this stuff and selling it as caviar.

The biggest thing is that, yes, fish stays alive.

You have really small impacts on the fish because you do it really, really fast.

You take the fish out of the water, you put it on the special holding facility, the fish is already starting to spawn, and

then all it requires basically for you to press on the belly, massage the belly, and

the caviar will just flow out of the fish.

The idea behind no kill caviar is a commendable one, but it has yet to really catch on.

Either way, with caviar farms in place, this gives the wild sturgeon population a chance to recover.

But whether or not that happens is largely up to us.

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Why Caviar Is So Expensive | So Expensive

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