Oh no! Poor people will be able to eat the same food as rich people! The tragedy!
Common China Win
To understand why, we need some history. Caviar first became popular as a lowly staple food in 10th-century Persia, before being adopted by Russian peasants, and then embraced by 16th-century Russian tsars, as a quasi-national dish. Then, in the 19th century, it became a luxury food in elite European and American circles, mostly sourced from wild fishing in Russia and Iran. When US special envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow this month, Russian officials proudly proffered a vast tub of red Russian caviar from the Khabarovsk region, as a gift to President Donald Trump. The tub’s producer then announced the launch of a new caviar brand called “Trumpovka”, presumably to display both collaboration — and Russian national pride. However, there is a deeply ironic twist here. In the 20th century, overfishing caused a collapse in wild sturgeon populations, leading to a 1982 European ban on wild fishing and in 1998 endangered species protection for sturgeon, and an eventual export ban on most wild caviar in 2006. This was (and is) often flouted. However, since 2008, 185 signatories — including the EU and US — stopped wild imports. So aquaculture flourished instead, offering a more sustainable source of eggs, and (in another irony) a “cleaner” taste, since the waters that traditionally produced “wild” caviar have become very polluted in recent years.
I detest roe in sushi. I’ve never had sturgeon eggs, is it similar?
Also notice another food that poor people used to enjoy until the wealthy drove up prices.
In the country where i come from we have a spread that’s made with just mayonnaise, fish roe (carp, usually), and a little bit of chopped onions. It is very much not a rich person food, it’s just something you have on bread in the morning.
I never understood why caviar is treated as such a delicacy, just because it’s from some rare fish. If that one fish is too rare just use a cheaper one. All fish roe tastes very similar to me.
I don’t mind it on sushi either, because to be completely honest i can’t even taste it most of the time. It’s usually salmon roe on sushi, right?
Anyway, if China can make “luxury” foods so cheap that they cease to be only for rich people, i’m all for it. Luxury is just a class signifier anyway, there’s nothing inherently better about most “luxury” foods.
Luxury good deflation shifts the Veblen window because class signifiers must go on.
Thank you for this. I think it’s more texture (the popping as I chew, but not like a grape or pomegranate, it’s the whole feel) than flavor, but I’m not particularly fond of either.
Apparently there are several kinds of roe used in sushi, I’d imagine salmon is used in the pricier options. I usually opt for what’s called here California roll
Filled with avocado, crab, and cucumber, it’s fresh and crunchy and makes a filling meal. You can use real or imitation crab. (All recipes website),
or
The Dragon Roll combines creamy avocado, sweet mango, and crispy shrimp tempura, creating an unforgettable taste adventure. (Melissa Recipe website)
Each about $8 for 8-10 pieces, so I can eat twice, unless I’ve not eaten all day until dinner.
And maybe with onion and mayo to help blunt the flavor and disguise the texture, it would be more palatable for me. Maybe a little dillweed or lemongrass?
Wtf, $8 for 8-10 pieces of sushi is really cheap, lol. Around here that’s more like €12+, for eight of the small ones, at a not very fancy place. Food in general has gotten really expensive. I used to be able to get a Döner for €3,50 in 2010, now they’re almost €10. A lot of that increase happened in the past five years.
Tbf, I’ve not had it all year, so who knows now, lol. It’s a little “fast food” style sushi joint about an hour away in a strip mall with a dollar store, so I wasn’t thinking about the rapid inflation, this year! Still , 12€ is a lot! I imagine that place’s money is made in volume, not price. And they make the rolls so fast, that guy made my last Cali roll in less than three minutes!
You won’t get a kebab here for $10, even before the price increases.
A small gyro also about an hour away used to be about $8, I can’t begin to imagine what that cost would be now. But my last Costco trip had center cut lamb chops at $7.49/lb, much less than any beef, including 1.34 lbs at $29.50, a tenth less pound of bison being the same price as ground beef. Fortunately, chicken is still affordable if it’s not organic. And pork is kind of affordable.
Edited for punctuation
Maybe sushi is the exception. Maybe it’s just more expensive here because it’s still considered more of a “luxury delicacy” than it is over there.
In general i always hear from Americans that groceries are more expensive there than they are in Europe, though i can’t say that i find groceries cheap here. Grocery prices have also increased a lot here since Covid. It also depends where you are in Europe. I think our prices in Germany are somewhere in the middle as far as Europe goes.
I do the shopping for a two person household but it’s sort of hard to quantify how much i spend exactly on groceries because it varies a lot by how often i go shopping and how much i buy, and one month can be very different than the next.
Very rough estimate would be €50 for smaller weekly shopping of perishables and then once a month another larger €150 trip to the grocery store to stock up on things that last longer. Which i guess averages to around €100 per week for food and some other minor necessities. It’s definitely a lot more than it was ten years ago.
And yeah, meat is expensive here too. I never buy beef because it’s too expensive but for chicken it starts at €9/kg which works out to…uh… $5/lbs maybe? Quality is generally pretty good in Europe even for the cheapest products, i guess that’s the one big advantage. And bread, fresh bread is still pretty cheap. And beer, though i don’t really drink. Everything else has gotten expensive.
When my friend lived in Germany a couple of decades ago, I was always shocked at grocery and weed prices, when they told me. I’m shocked when you told me! But for two people, that cost seems extraordinarily reasonable.
Our bread is trash, to be honest. I bet even baking fresh would be not great since good flour would be hard to source and crazily expensive.
You also have to remember that European incomes are lower on average than US incomes, especially after your various taxes and social contributions get subtracted.
Rents i think are in general still lower in Germany than they are in the US, though relative to the incomes it’s still not cheap and they are constantly increasing every year, however energy costs are way higher. Compared to just five years ago our heating bill now is a nightmare.
And there is also a huge wealth disparity and disparity in cost of living between different European countries, though the cost of living disparity is actually less than the wealth disparity which is a real problem for the poorer EU members.
For example, since joining the EU, due to the common market, costs of basic products in Romania have almost reached the level of products in wealthier western European countries like Germany, while incomes in Romania are nowhere close to western European incomes.
Even as defenders of the EU sing the EU’s praises and claim that the EU makes the countries that join it richer, the reality is often much more complicated. Yes it made some people rich, and these people now get to go on expensive vacations all across Europe multiple times a year and buy imported luxury goods.
But for the majority of working people the improvement was not really felt. It just increased the rate of emigration and allowed more people to move to richer EU countries, especially the most highly skilled and educated people, which is a serious loss for these already poorer countries.
I don’t know how i got to venting about the EU again from the topic of costs of living. Sorry. I tend to go on tangents sometimes.
I’m guessing you wouldn’t like caviar if you hate roe in sushi. It’s similar texture, but salty.
It’s sounding a lot like Vegemite smells, but with texture. Thank you.
More fishy, not quite as salty.
Lol. Good to know, thanks!
