Synonymous with indulgent excess, caviar is the new starlet of sustainability

The next step: black gold produced globally without killing sturgeon.

- GEMMA ZOE PRICE

This winter, as with every other harvest season, California Caviar Company CEO and founder Deborah Keane and her team will lift sturgeon from their tanks to produce tons of the unctuous black orbs prized by gourmands the world over. Except this year, on top of a bountiful harvest, Keane is hoping that the US Food and Drug Administration will approve her final samples so that come 2021, she can craft the first domestic caviar without having to slaughter the sturgeon that produced it.

Unlike the traditional method, where the fish’s ovaries are surgically removed with the roe inside, this so-called “no-kill” method involves workers massaging mature eggs from the sturgeon’s belly, stabilising them in a calcium bath so they retain their pearl-like texture and can be cured, before the fish are released back into the water.

The process was invented by marine biologist Dr Angela Köhler more than a decade ago to make farming sturgeon more economically appealing, thereby undermining the poaching of threatened wild sturgeon — a family of fish that’s been around for over 200 million years and has been listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) — a treaty that aims to regulate the international trade of endangered species — since 1998.

“If the caviar will be available [at] a reasonable price, it doesn’t make any sense anymore to catch wild sturgeon,” says Köhler, whose former employer, Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, holds the patent for her technique.