The International Caviar Market Is Rife with Fraud

Caviar has never gone out of style, but these days, it’s particularly in demand. In the last year or so, the upmarket delicacy has begun to make regular appearances in over-the-top stunt foods, such as garnishing fried fish sandwiches, and highbrow-lowbrow trendy pairings like caviar-topped Pringles. Market research suggests that U.S. sales are expected to surpass $400 million this year, up from $100 million in 2022. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] This swelling demand may be good news for Pringles, but it’s bad news to Jutta Jahrl, a conservationist and project manager at the World Wildlife Foundation(WWF) who studies sturgeons. Without sturgeons, there is no caviar. Though humans eat roe, or clumps of eggs, taken from the ovaries of many fish species, only salt-cured sturgeon eggs can be called caviar. But caviar consumers have good reason to be wary of what’s really in that tin. In a new study led by Jahrl and an evolutionary genetics team at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany, they found that 29% of commercially sold caviar tested across four European countries had been procured or sold in violation of codes protecting endangered species. Ten percent of the caviar they tested wasn’t even fish eggs, and was instead a mix of unidentifiable DNA, suspected sturgeon offal, and artificial products.. “It was even worse than we thought,” Jahrl says. Isotope analysis of fish eggs Illegal o...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news