The VICE Guide to Caviar

Do you like caviar? Did you ever stop to ponder just how it geared you up to get laid with a flute of champagne by the fire, or even just decadently splooged across your pancakes? I know how, and I am about to tell you, and both of us will never be the same again.

First off, forget about getting that rare beluga shit. Don’t even think about it. The beasts it comes from are critically endangered, they live primarily in the Caspian Sea—the world’s largest saltwater lake—and we need to just leave them the fuck alone. It might feel really sexy and fun, like you are some hot expensive playa, to eat something that is about as common as getting struck by a meteor, but what little cache beluga caviar once possessed, that posturing of some kind of grandeur or whatever, is falling out of fashion faster than those yeti coats from last season. It doesn’t make you look any younger, it’s not an aphrodisiac, and it doesn’t even taste that good. Killing a 2,000-pound creature just to harvest its eggs that’ll run you $8000 a kilo is some major bullshit. Stop.

Especially because there are more sustainable ways to get your egg fix. While in New Brunswick, I checked out a neat little short-nosed sturgeon farm and got “The Grand Tour,” sampled some embryos, and pretty much fainted afterwards.

Primer: Sturgeon are an ancient genus, probably looking pretty similar to how they did over 250 million years ago. Tough cookies these fish—they have exo-skeletons, armor plating on their backs, and can live in either fresh or saltwater. Cray cray! There are about 26 remaining species of sturgeon left in the world, many of them having been hunted to extinction for caviar.

Finally, each individual spec of blood and gore is separated from the eggs with a pair of tweezers.

After curing with the salt for a little while, the caviar takes on that more familiar briny ocean flavor, which I am taking their word on because after all that, I unfortunately had to decline the tasting portion of the tour.