When I first started eating out, I would regard ‘luxury ingredients’ with longing and awe. Caviar used to be so rare and so expensive than one of the claims made for overpriced first class seats on aeroplanes was that caviar was served as part of the inflight meal. Truffles were a mysterious food that we had only heard about and never smelled or tasted. Foie gras was a luxury that hardly ever made it onto menus. Smoked salmon was a great treat because it was so delicious and so expensive. Japanese beef was the ultimate delicacy; served only in tiny quantities.
All that has now changed. Even in India’s big cities, it is now possible to go online or to make a phone call and someone will deliver caviar to your doorstep. During the truffle season, nearly every second European/continental restaurant in India has a truffle festival. Foie gras now faces disdain from animal lovers but is not overly expensive as demand plummets. And smoked salmon has become the sort of product you see overflowing on supermarket shelves.
How has this been possible?
The primary reason is that the global economy is now run on the basis that supply will always increase to meet demand. Where there are shortages, people will find ways to end them.
I like to give the parallel of diamonds, most of which will shrink in price and value over the years as better and better lab diamonds come on the market. That’s partly what’s happening with luxury foods.
As you probably know, caviar is the roe of the sturgeon fish. It is the various breeds of sturgeon that give their names to the most popular kinds of caviar: beluga, sevruga, oscietra etc. For much of the 20th century, we took the line that real caviar could only come from the Caspian Sea, which was bordered by Iran and the erstwhile eSoviet Union.
Both countries rigidly controlled the production of caviar, refusing to allow over-fishing, nurturing the sturgeon and ensuring that all the caviar sold maintained a high standard. This arrangement collapsed when the Soviet Union did. Its Caspian border was divided among several, largely lawless, countries, where local mafias were allowed to take over the caviar business.
This led to over-fishing and to a massive drop in the quality of caviar harvested. And eventually the wild Caspian sturgeon became an endangered species. For a while, it seemed as though caviar would soon become extinct. Then the opposite happened. Supplies suddenly shot up. Prices, in real terms, came down.
It was all down to caviar farming. It takes at least a decade for a sturgeon to start producing caviar. But shrewd businessmen had observed the chaos in the Caspian caviar market and realised that farming was the answer. Just when good caviar became hard to find, the new farms went onstream and suddenly there was a glut of the stuff.
Leading the way was China. In 2022, nearly 40% of the caviar sold all over the world came from China. Italy, which came second, had only 13% of the market. And the old Soviet Republics did not even make the list of top 10 producers.
Since then, China’s share of the market has increased.
You might not notice this because the Chinese rarely sell caviar under their own brand names. It’s usually packaged in European countries, sold with names that don’t sound at all Chinese and the Europeans go to great lengths to avoid mentioning the Chinese origin of the caviar. But the reality is that 15% of all of the world’s caviar comes from just one small city in China’s Sichuan province that few people have ever heard of: Ya’an.
That’s why caviar can be ubiquitous at restaurants these days and that’s why it’s now sold at more accessible prices.
Something different but similar has happened to the truffle market. According to tradition, black truffles come from Perigord in France and white truffles come from Alba in Italy. This has never been entirely true. You find black truffles all over France, not just in Perigord. And you find white truffles in Tuscany, some distance away from Alba, in Italy.
It is an integral part of the truffle legend that truffles can never be cultivated. They grow wild. That’s what makes them so rare.
This has always been a lie. Black truffles can be cultivated without much difficulty in the right terroir and though the French are loath to admit it, they have run black truffle farms for decades. Many of the truffles they passed off as being miracles of nature were actually grown by farmers.
Once people realised this, it was easy enough to plant truffles in other parts of the world. The world’s largest producer of black truffles is not France. It is Spain. Even Italy produces good quality black truffles. More surprisingly, the Australians have managed to grow excellent truffles in various parts of their country, including Tasmania.
As you might expect, the Chinese have also tried to dominate this market. The problem is that they have not found a part of China where they can grow truffles that have the same aroma as European black truffles. They say it’s only a matter of time before they get it right so,
in a few years, truffles could cost not much more than mushrooms.
The white truffle has a more complicated story. Italians say it only grows wild which may or may not be true. But what is clear is that it grows in many different parts of Europe, not just in Italy. For instance, most of the world’s white truffles now come from Eastern Europe, from countries like Croatia. The Italians are reluctant to admit this. And indeed, Croatians usually sell their white truffles to Italian companies who repackage them as Alba truffles for the international market.
It is possible that Eastern European farmers are now cultivating the white truffle. But the official story is that the truffle has always grown in such countries as the former Yugoslavia but that Communism kept us from finding out.
Whatever the truth about the white truffle boom, the next time you wonder how so many hotels managed to host truffle festivals, thank the global economy and its way of creating new supplies at more reasonable prices.
The case of Wagyu beef, now found all over the West, even at burger joints, is not particularly complex; just disappointing. The Japanese have no great ancient beef tradition. But when they did develop one in the second half of the 20th century, their cows were so well bred that the beef came to be known, like French wine, for the region it came from: For instance, Hyogo, Shiga, Mie prefecture etc. This beef was expensive and rare and usually sliced thin and enjoyed only on special occasions.
Sometime in the 1990s, the world discovered Japanese beef and took to using the generic term Wagyu for it. The way the term is now used makes the origins of the cow almost entirely irrelevant. The overwhelming majority of Wagyu sold around the world is not Japanese at all. It comes from farms in Australia, the United States, Argentina and other countries with a tradition of cattle breeding. There is no real regulation of the use of the name. If a cow may have had a Japanese ancestor of some kind, that is enough for the beef to be labelled Wagyu. That’s why Wagyu beef is so affordable. And that’s why so much of it is so terrible that no Japanese foodie would dream of touching it.
Human intervention and mislabelling are at the root of the explosion of luxury foods. Take the example of smoked salmon. The salmon is one of the world’s great fish and when you smoke it, you create an extraordinary product. Unfortunately, most of the salmon you will now get has been farmed. Often fish farms raise tasteless, fatty salmon whose skin has to be artificially coloured. This is the kind of salmon that is used for most smoked salmon these days. It’s cheap enough to be a supermarket staple. But it tastes nothing like the real thing.
Is human intervention a good thing? I can never quite make up my mind. In some ways, I miss the taste of the original ingredients. On the other hand, even if there is a drop in quality, farming and cultivating have increased production so much that so-called luxury foods are no longer completely out of reach. And that, I guess, counts for something.
