Word: beluga
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some people spread it on lightly buttered toast as a holiday treat. Others wrap it in blinis with a dollop of sour cream. But purists insist that the best way to eat beluga caviar is straight off a golden or ivory spoon, followed by a shot of vodka or a sip of ice-cold champagne. For those who can afford to shell out $450 for a 125-gram tin, these precious salted sturgeon eggs are a taste of the true Western high life?a chance to indulge like the Russian czars and czarinas, who feasted regularly on fine caviar...
...Better get your last licks in soon, however. The beluga sturgeon that produce the world's best caviar are under enormous pressure from overfishing, dam building and pollution by the former Soviet republics that ring the Caspian Sea. Most species of sturgeon are in decline?some by as much as 90%?and those native to the Caspian appear doomed. Environmental groups have petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to put beluga on the endangered-species list?a move that would cut off supply to the world's largest market of consumers. (Americans swallow up to 80% of the annual...
...People are going to have to live without beluga caviar for a while if we are going to have any hope of rescuing the species," says Lisa Speer, senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a spokeswoman for a sturgeon-hugging coalition that calls itself Caviar Emptor...
...Anatoli Vlasenko, deputy director of the Caspian Research Institute of Fisheries, disputes reports of the beluga's demise. "The 90% depletion figure is a gross exaggeration on the part of the nervous media," he says. Still, the Russians have worked hard to sustain the remaining population with hatcheries and export quotas. Banning imports "would be the catalyst for a new round of poaching and illegal trade," says Armen Petrossian, head of the International Caviar Importers Association. In the U.S., the demand for beluga caviar has led not just to illegal imports of what some call black gold but also...
...been easy. Even at $30 to $75 an ounce, "it's perceived as cheaper and not as good," says Chuck Edwards, Stolt's sales and marketing manager. That perception is changing. As caviar snobbery gives way to environmental concerns, some top chefs are giving up not only on beluga but on the closely related osetra and sevruga caviars from the same region. More than 100 U.S. chefs and retailers have signed a letter to Interior Secretary Gail Norton supporting a beluga ban. Among them is Rick Moonen, former chef of New York City's Oceana, who recently opened...