Isophoric News · Tuesday, October 27, 2026
The Caviar Problem
I went on a blind date with Bigfoot. I need to talk about the caviar.
My friend Gerald set it up. He said he knew someone who was private, outdoorsy, and not on any of the apps. He did not mention the height. He did not mention the hands. He did not mention the smell, which I will describe as cedar bark and something older, something geological, like the air inside a cave that has not been opened in a long time. We met at a restaurant I will not name because they are still open and what happened next is not their fault.
The date ordered beluga caviar. By name. Without looking at the menu. And the restaurant brought it.
Here is the problem. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service banned the import of beluga caviar in 2005 under the Endangered Species Act after CITES flagged the beluga sturgeon as critically depleted. The Caspian Sea population had crashed from decades of overfishing. A female beluga sturgeon takes roughly twenty years to begin producing eggs, and the species was not recovering fast enough to sustain a legal harvest. Before the ban, beluga caviar sold for upward of five thousand dollars a pound. After the ban, it does not exist in this country. Not legally.
So either the restaurant was serving it in violation of federal wildlife law, or my date had a supply chain that does not go through US customs.
I sat there with a glass of the house white and watched an eight foot tall primate eat endangered fish eggs with a mother of pearl spoon, and I realized that nobody has ever asked the obvious question about Bigfoot. Not where it lives. Not whether it is real. The question is how it eats. Something that large, that widely distributed, that consistently reported near freshwater systems and migratory fish routes, is not foraging for berries. It is fishing. And if it is fishing, it has territory. And if it has territory, it has trade.
The caviar was not from a restaurant supplier. It was from a supply chain that predates customs, predates import law, predates the country. My date did not need a menu because my date has been eating sturgeon roe since before anyone thought to put it in a tin and charge five thousand dollars.
Gerald has not returned my calls.
T.F. Shaw