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Caviar Pizzas, New Money, and the Death of an Ancient Fish

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I am sitting at a slick Manhattan waterfront restaurant on the banks of the East River, New York City, trying to decide why I find the caviar pizza on the menu so disturbing.

Jonathan Haffmans, the executive chef of Industry Kitchen, is telling me how their extremely expensive signature “24K” pie is made. “First of all,” Haffmans says, “if you want it, you have to book it at least 48 hours in advance. It takes us that long to assemble all the ingredients.” When an order comes in (and there are around 15 to 20 requests a year), Haffmans begins by preparing a dough tinted black with squid ink. Once kneaded and shaped, a base of garlic crème fraiche and Stilton cheese is laid down. Then the artists adorn their canvas, applying topping after indulgent topping. Buds of Périgord truffles and wedges of foie gras fan out from the center. Gold leaf and edible flower petals flutter down to bring a little color. Finally, the pièce de résistance is administered: heaping spoonfuls of French platinum osetra caviar, distributed so that each of the pizza’s eight slices is anointed with some sturgeon eggs. When the check is finally dropped, diners can expect to pay US $2,000. For just $700, an additional heaping tablespoon of premium, yellow-tinted almas osetra will find its way onto your pizza.

That the 24K is meant to appeal to a certain kind of over-the-top client during this new Gilded Age is self-evident. With more than $16 trillion in stock market wealth created in the past 10 years alone, a couple thousand bucks is chump change to the Wall Street bros and sisses who work just three blocks south of Industry Kitchen. But the 24K is just one dish on a whole exploding menu of caviar options that have burst onto the internet and into real life in the last decade.

24K pizza

In this century, caviar has become so ubiquitous that diners smear expensive roe from sturgeon on pretty much anything, from Pringles to pizza. Photo by Industry Kitchen

Plug “caviar” into TikTok or Instagram and you’ll likely encounter someone named Danielle Zaslavskaya, also known as the Caviar Queen. Clad in designer loungewear and diamond-heavy jewelry, the Ukrainian-born Zaslavskaya spreads caviar over whatever’s at hand—fish fingers, Doritos, Pringles—you name it. As the VP of Brand Partnerships for the caviar and luxury goods distributor Marky’s (and the granddaughter of the founder), she has plenty of supply on hand. These moments in turn feed more online moments shared by lower-grade influencers who emulate “their Queen.” Then the bots and algorithms take over, endlessly amplifying until all this caviar hysteria circles back to Industry Kitchen. A not insignificant portion of the 24K orders logged each year come from influencers, dropping by the East River to take their own publicized bite.

Whether on a Dorito or a $2,000 pizza, these ephemera add up to something real in the physical world of fish. Until relatively recently, salted sturgeon eggs (and sometimes eggs of salmon, paddlefish, or a handful of other fish species that fall into the caviar bucket) were a pricey but very niche menu item first popularized by Russian royalty in tsarist times. No more. Global caviar sales have surged 74 percent since 2020, especially during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the idea of a luxury-experience-in-a-can appealed to the restaurant-deprived. Caviar producers in California, Europe, and China recorded burgeoning profits, while the total volume of sturgeon product entering the United States—the world’s largest caviar producer—has also swelled. But, like matryoshka nesting dolls, an array of businesses fronted by influencers and marketed on all kinds of social media platforms manage to move vast amounts of fish eggs without ever getting anyone’s hands slimy.

@dzaslavsky Back to basics with my favorite Doritos and Caviar, cause duh…this time I used sour cream instead of cream fraiche and its also very BOMB. #doritosandcaviar #caviar #daniellemademedoit #snacktime ♬ original sound – DANIELLE

Caviar has become a topping that social media influencers will spread on mundane junk foods, such as Doritos.

So why do I find all this so disturbing? Why should I begrudge an entrepreneurial influencer her right to hawk sevruga-on-a-Pringle? Why should I not let every Wall Street titan have their gilded slice free of guilt?

I’m not sure at first, but I think it’s something coarse and fancy at the same time—something that is as bad for nature as it is good for a restaurant’s bottom line. In short, I think it has something to do with the Russian word poshlost’.

I am holding my aching head, surveying the ruins of a banquet on the shores of the greatest sturgeon river in the world.

It is 1992 and I am at the Volga River in the Russian city of Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad). I am trying to make my undergraduate degree in Soviet studies earn me a little dough by working for a post-Soviet peace initiative that will bring me to post-Soviet Russia numerous times over the next four years. Before me, in accordance with what passes for swank at the time, is a bottle of Russian vodka, a bottle of Armenian cognac, a bottle of sweet Georgian wine, and a Pepsi. Also on the table are heaps of uneaten sturgeon caviar left over from one hell of a bender. The words of my Russian soon-to-be ex-wife rise up in my alcohol-soaked brain: “Foo, kakaya poshlost’.”

Yuck, what vulgarity.

Except, not quite vulgarity. Like many Russian words, poshlost’ requires a handful of English words to convey its complete meaning. When you unpack poshlost’ in full, you get something that also conveys an impression of ignorant status-yearning. A woman who is poshlaya is striving to rise above her station by pursuing a refinement that she can’t quite understand. Like caviar, for example. It was desperate striving poshlost’ that helped break caviar out of its Russian box in the 1980s and ignite a global trend.

soviet caviar advertisement

Before its dissolution as a state, the Soviet Union kept tight reins on the global caviar trade. Photo by The Protected Art Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

For the better part of the 20th century, the Soviet Union had maintained a near monopoly on the caviar trade. Bureaucrats in Moscow knew its value very well. As a poor country in need of foreign currency to prop up its embryonic economy, the USSR was eager to monetize mink, gold, diamonds—anything that caught the attention of strivers in the West. Because of its association with the Russian nobility, who spent lavishly all over Europe before the 1917 Russian Revolution, caviar fell into that category.

This arrangement worked for the Soviets and the sturgeon, which can grow up to five meters long. Even though the 28 or so species of sturgeon that complete their life cycle by predictably migrating upriver to spawn are a kind of living fossil—essentially unchanged for over 200 million years of evolution—they are highly vulnerable to human exploitation. They generally don’t reach sexual maturity until approaching a decade of life. In the wild, every species of sturgeon on Earth is either threatened, endangered, or critically endangered, victims of the modern indignities of poor fisheries management, pollution, habitat destruction, and over-exploitation. An early-20th-century caviar frenzy, for instance, nearly obliterated these ancient fish up and down the American East Coast. But the Soviet government, when it existed, was a bit of a lifeline for wild sturgeon. Whereas Canada or the United States might declare a “conservation area” or a “national park” to protect native sturgeon species, the Soviets created zapovedniki: forbidden zones where the general public was banned. One of the Soviet Union’s very first zapovedniks—the Astrakhan Biosphere Nature Reserve—covers a territory where the mighty Volga River empties into Central Asia’s Caspian Sea in a myriad of swampy channels, prime egg-laying territory for sturgeon returning from the great inland sea. Iran also controls a huge swath of the Caspian Sea but has never been a guarantor of sturgeon conservation. Soviet Kontrol was therefore critical to maintaining the five species endemic to the region: the Persian (Acipenser persicus), Danube (A. gueldenstaedtii), starry (A. stellatus), fringebarbel (A. nudiventris), and—the most valuable of all—beluga (Huso huso).

historical image of caviar being canned

In the 1940s, the production of canned caviar for export was in full swing in the Soviet Union. Photo by Shawshots/Alamy Stock Photo

With Soviet Communism’s decay in the 1980s and full-on collapse by the end of 1991, the country became what the Franco-Russian writer Emmanuel Carrère called “a paradise for resourceful hooligans.” Soon it seemed that anyone with a plane ticket to Astrakhan, Russia, a boat, and a knife could plunder sturgeon stocks. Richard Adams Carey, who did an extensive investigation into the black market caviar trade, reports in an excellent book rereleased this fall, The Philosopher Fish, that massive carcasses of these slow-growing, long-lived animals—slit open and stripped of their eggs—were discarded to rot all through the myriad channels of the savaged Volga delta.

The surge in illegal supply rippled out into Europe and as far away as the United States. “I had guys coming into the store,” recalls Ira Goller, owner of the locally famous Murray’s Sturgeon Shop on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “They’d open up their coats and have cans and cans of the stuff. I didn’t want any part of it.” At one point, a caviar war broke out between Macy’s department store and Zabar’s, the bastion of Jewish “appetizing,” causing the price of caviar to drop and drop, eventually bottoming out at $8.56 an ounce. “You could walk down Broadway and there’d be these little plastic caviar containers all over the sidewalk,” Goller says. That’s how cheap it was.

Until there was none of it.

Alarmed at the precipitous decline in such a majestic and ancient group of fish as the Caspian sturgeon, in 2000 a consortium of US-based nonprofits launched a kind of pre-meme meme to get people to stop eating Caspian caviar. Branded “Caviar Emptor: Let the Connoisseur Beware,” the campaign sought to halt what it punned as the wild east’s Roe to Ruin. From 2001 to 2005, activists pushed for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to list Caspian sturgeon, which would severely curtail the global trade. (Listing by CITES rigorously limits international trade in animals and animal produce, and can effectively cauterize an artery of heretofore hemorrhaging exploitation.) CITES agreed—but the caviar industry pushed back, prompting CITES to delist beluga sturgeon. Legal trade never slowed, and the illegal trade likewise continued apace. In 2005, the United States banned trade in Caspian beluga caviar. The next year, CITES finally issued a complete and total ban on the trade of wild Caspian sturgeon caviar, though a year later, it reopened trade in osetra, sevruga, and beluga caviar. Despite some backpedaling, the great garish gold rush was over.

For the moment.

I am standing beside a massive green tank in an industrial warehouse in rural North Carolina watching several hundred meter-long osetra sturgeon making excruciatingly repetitive loops around the huge tank. Around and around they go, diverging in their slow swim only to snatch the industrial feed pellets that periodically spray out of the automatic feeder at the center of the tank. Apart from the initial shock I feel when I first see these living dinosaurs, the overwhelming feeling that starts to come over me is boredom. I am not alone in this. In a 2015 study of boredom and its effects, researchers settled on an aquaculture training video as the best way to induce that deadening sensation.

But were it not for this boring, plodding advance in science, the Caviar Queen—who, I would venture, wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this—might never have come into existence. For it wasn’t glamour or branding or high fashion that moved caviar from the absurdly expensive to just-kind-of-pricey category, but this: fish farming.

farmed sturgeon

Soviet scientists experimented with sturgeon aquaculture and eventually successfully produced stock that could grow and reproduce in captivity. Photo by Yurii Zushchyk/Alamy Stock Photo

“It wasn’t easy,” the late Soviet-born scientist Sergei Doroshov told me back in 2014 from his home-in-exile in Sacramento, California. “The difficulty is that the time of maturity is very late. Which when you compare to a salmon, which is only two or three years, makes things complicated.” In the 1970s, Doroshov brought to the United States the secrets of sturgeon breeding and feeding that had been developed under the Soviets. Aquaculture, often called the “Blue Revolution,” was growing to embrace more and more species in the 1960s and ‘70s. For anyone who knew of the ancient fish’s slow maturity, high value, and potential vulnerability in the wild, it was obvious that sturgeon was an ideal candidate for domestication. This was true not only for Soviet-based sturgeon but sturgeon species throughout the northern hemisphere. Eventually, Doroshov was given a position at the University of California, Davis and advanced the early methodology to domesticate the white sturgeon (A. transmontanus), a species endemic to North America and whose range extends from Mexico to the Gulf of Alaska. In time, that same technology was applied to a few individuals of the several species of Caspian sturgeon that had been brought alive to the United States before the CITES ban. In the end, all of this bloomed into something that I called the American caviar renaissance in a 2014 Food and Wine article. Today, white sturgeon grow in tanks across California, Hawai‘i, Oregon, and Idaho. Meanwhile, in the southeastern United States—in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, in particular—more Russian sturgeon probably reside on farms than exist in the entirety of the Caspian wild.

And it wasn’t just in the United States that the taming of sturgeon came to be seen as a useful thing to do. Canada, France, and Italy have all become significant growers since the Soviet Union collapsed. And China, beginning in the early 2000s, attempted to elevate all of its export products by launching the world’s largest and most expensive sturgeon caviar initiative, eventually attracting top endorsers like celebrity chef Eric Ripert. A rising caviar lifts all boats, Chinese economists reasoned. Today, China accounts for more than half of global caviar output.

caviar being extracted from a sturgeon

The continued extraction of eggs from sturgeon for the caviar market threatens the existence of the fish, an animal unchanged for over 200 million years. Photo by Pavel Sytilin/Alamy Stock Photo

But sturgeon farming’s real effect was to cheapen caviar to the point where suddenly it became accessible to the masses; tasteable not just on the tip of a tiny mother-of-pearl spoon but as a condiment. The less premium Chinese product entering the market has had a major effect, lowering overall wholesale prices by 50 percent since 2012. “You’d never take caviar that’s $300 an ounce and put it on something,” the San Francisco Michelin-star chef Matthew Accarino of the restaurant SPQR told me at the time of my caviar renaissance research. “Farming allows people to enjoy caviar in a way that it’s an ingredient rather than an unobtainable luxury item.”

So all is smooth sailing right? Let China, the Michelin-rated chefs, and the Caviar Queen spread their farmed eggs where it pleases them.

Except.

In 2022, after a protracted 10-year battle with caviar producers, the US Fish and Wildlife Service drafted a motion that is set to declare 10 species of Russian and European sturgeon endangered (US sturgeon species had already earned the endangered designation back in the early 2010s). Should this happen, it would eliminate the ability of American growers “to possess, harvest, sell, or harass” the fish that are already on their own farms. If the law passes, growers would have 30 days to liquidate their stocks. While fish farmers in Europe, Canada, and China wouldn’t technically have to do the same, the US market would be closed to them, cutting them off from the largest caviar market in the world. Sturgeon farming could very soon be taken off the table entirely. One grower, Jeff Hinshaw at a sturgeon aquaculture facility in Georgia, told me that the potential threat of a return to smuggling of wild product is a very real prospect. “If you do anything to limit sturgeon farming, you’ve taken a large step backwards in terms of black market harvesting, which could be the death knell of some of these wild stocks.”

It’s unclear exactly how this draft statute bubbled up from the ether and threatened to take farmed caviar hostage. That illegal trading of sturgeon eggs persists is surely true. Between 2010 and 2015, customs officials seized almost 2,000 kilograms of caviar at the US border—mostly from Russia. A 2018 report by the nonprofit group TRAFFIC stated that black market wild caviar is still being sold under the table, and the myriad agents moving product all over the world can often result in farmed and wild getting jumbled along the way. But the issue is more nuanced. Republicans who’ve long wanted to defang the U.S.’s Endangered Species Act may be receptive to any change that weakens it. Democrats who may suspect a deeper anti-environmental agenda hidden behind what seems like a harmless tweak are digging in their heels. Over on the internet, a pair of twins called the Beckermans recently posted a long screed against the cruelties suffered by farmed sturgeon. “There’s five-feet long endangered sturgeons (fishes) suffering in tiny tanks for 10-plus years, enduring repeated stabbings in their abdomens (to check if their eggs are mature) and workers sucking their eggs out with straws—all for a luxury garnish. The inhumane way they torture and stab the fish is NOT chic and NOT okay.”

police officer holding black market caviar

When the Soviet Union faltered, the black market for caviar from Russian sturgeon exploded. The shipment of illegally procured caviar, seized in Hamburg, Germany, in 2003, was worth almost US $400 per 500 grams. Photo by DPA Picture Alliance/Alamy Stock Photo

Regardless, it’s interesting to speculate what would happen if sturgeon aquaculture shut down and the only supply of caviar in the world became, once again, wild and endangered. If the Caviar Queen were to spread the progeny of an endangered wild beluga sturgeon on her Doritos, surely chaos would ensue. Like the ornithologist who infamously killed a mustached kingfisher for a museum collection and became the internet’s demon-of-the-year in 2015, the Queen would likely be dumped and pilloried faster than the world’s meme-ologists could say “I like turtles.”

I am scrolling and clicking and typing and talking on the phone with a person whose job it is to influence influencers.

Sara Wilson is known for coining the term “digital campfires”—the little flames lighted by relative unknowns on TikTok and Instagram that occasionally set ablaze dozens of zettabytes across the internet. Originally a journalist, today she lives in Los Angeles, California, and works with a range of clients helping them hitch their brands to trends: trends that she tracks and reads in a way that I imagine Morpheus aboard the Nebuchadnezzar followed the movements of agents across the Matrix.

I want to understand why caviar has taken off in the 2020s, and why the Caviar Queen has been able to establish such a vast online kingdom.

Wilson thinks about this question for exactly five seconds. “I hadn’t heard about caviar being a thing when you first mentioned it,” she tells me, “but it checks a lot of boxes. It makes total sense.” In essence, she explains, it has something to do with the intersection of faux royalty, status, and FOMO (fear of missing out).

She begins by saying the “whole tinned fish thing” had had a moment during and immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic. So there was that. And also, she points out, “protein” is having a moment. And there was also the fact that you were eating actual eggs of something. A feeling that brought you closer to nature.

But what was probably really driving the trend toward caviar, she thinks, is an obsession with “old money aesthetics” that started to appear in the last few years; something often referred to on social media as quiet luxury.

Fueled by things like the hit television show Succession, the trend circles around an inchoate nostalgia for an imaginary past when more people had generational money—“the opposite of flashing your wealth,” she says. Through caviar, Wilson suggests, customers might feel they were “accessing that lifestyle.” Moreover, she points out, a food product, compared to most other luxury products, is a relatively inexpensive “social flex.” Compared to a $20,000 yachting tour of the Greek Islands or a $100,000 luxury automobile, a $100 tin of caviar is a steal.

Scroll through feeds on Instagram and you can find caviar on almost anything, including fried chicken.

Or course, Wilson acknowledges, “the idea of having wealth for generations is ridiculous and completely out of reach” for most of the people buying caviar. “But that’s what makes it so compelling.”

Inherited, unimaginable wealth, strived for hopelessly by people who haven’t a clue or a means of how to get it.

Poshlost’, in other words.

I am swimming a long, slow circle in waters less than one kilometer south of Industry Kitchen and the 24K caviar pizza, in a river where federally endangered wild Atlantic (A. oxyrinchus) and shortnose sturgeon (A. brevirostrum) still swim. I feel the shifts in temperature and current around me as I round the tip of Governors Island and head north toward Manhattan, shuddering at the thought of being struck by one of the dozens of container ships, pleasure craft, tugboats, and cruise vessels steaming their way into the busiest harbor on the East Coast of the United States. I feel positively anadromous as I sense the tide shift and bear me up the east side of Governors toward the mouth of the Hudson River and the upstream gravel beds where, were I actually a sturgeon, I would lay my immensely valuable eggs.

There are no sturgeon sought or sighted during my swim—it’s just a casually competitive three-kilometer swim—put on every year by a local nonprofit. But others have stroked in these waters and come across the fish. The long-distance open-water swimmer Christopher Swain, after completing a 214-kilometer traversing of Long Island Sound, passed under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and discovered a dead two-meter-long sturgeon shredded and floating nearby. “At first glance I mistook it for another piece of garbage floating out on the tide,” he tells me later. “I remember thinking, ‘Here was a fellow swimmer who didn’t make it.’”

A dead sturgeon spotted in Long Island Sound, under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.

If there is a consequence of the Teflon-y, glossy surface of the Caviar Queen and her imitators scarfing down millions of sturgeon eggs a year, it is a blissful ignorance of the presence of the living, wild animal that made those eggs possible. “Until the last fraction of a second in geologic time,” author Richard Carey writes in The Philosopher Fish, “sturgeons were the dominant large fish in every major river system on all three continents of the temperate northern hemisphere, unassailable (except from artillery) and prolifically abundant.” Far more ancient than nearly every other fish we eat, they form a largely unchanged, ancient evolutionary bridge between animals like sharks and rays and the modern fish we know today. Like the auroch, we have tamed it into something resembling a water cow.

Upstream from here in the Hudson River, small, remnant populations of wild Atlantic and shortnose sturgeon hang on, but just barely. In a later journey up the river, I stop by a tributary called Moodna Creek, which drains Storm King Mountain, one of the sites that birthed the modern American environmental movement. Next to the creek is a sign with a blue and white picture of a sturgeon—a sign you find on rivers and streams all over the Hudson Valley. But a sturgeon sighting is a rarity.

I want to find sturgeon, or at least traces of their existence in the wild. I want to see where they lay their precious eggs and understand what stands in the way of their ability to complete their life cycle. So I find someone who knows: former NYPD cop-turned-ecology-PhD George Jackman, who tried to clear sturgeons’ natal creeks of the obstacles that prevent them from spawning, in the same way he tried to clear the streets of violence as a beat cop. As we walk the banks of rivers an hour north of Manhattan, waterways that should be prime sturgeon spawning grounds, he shows me half a dozen useless dams thrown up by industry of days past that could possibly impede the great fish’s return. And it’s not just dams. He talks about lawsuits too. The organization he once worked for, Riverkeeper, has just filed suits in New York, Delaware, and New Jersey to compel state agencies to intervene on behalf of the thousands of sturgeon that are allegedly caught as by-catch by various fisheries and dumped back in the water dead, often unreported. He talks about the ship strikes that kill a thousand more sturgeon a year up and down the East Coast. I nod in sympathy. But I also think of all the people on TikTok who know nothing of this great fish—who only know the eggs that are in ample supply. I wonder out loud what it would take to make the average American care about any of this.

“What would you say if I bombed the Louvre?” Jackman asks, tearing up. “These fish are *masterpieces.*”

I am driving ever northward, out of New York City. I’m seeking the source of the Hudson River sturgeon, seeking to lay eyes on the creature that has become so distant from us even as its eggs have grown more visible around the world through social media.

Part of the tragedy of the poshlost’ of online caviar hawkers is the fact that while the farmed fish’s industrially managed spawn becomes ever more visible, the real, wild fish fades from sight and memory. So I journey north to Hyde Park, where the salt front of the Hudson River ends and the fresh water suitable for nurturing sturgeon eggs begins. I board an observation skiff and make my way toward a team of scientists in the middle of the river who’ve put out three set nets at the beginning of the incoming tide in hopes of catching, tagging, and releasing a wild Atlantic sturgeon.

At the first net, fisheries biologist Amanda Higgs directs a team to slowly draw in the net. I tense when I see one of the floats atop the net wiggle slightly. But it’s just the current jostling the buoys. The net comes up empty, and we move downstream to the next location.

Amanda Higgs

Scientist Amanda Higgs collects biological data from a 90-kilogram sturgeon she caught and released in the Hudson River. Photo by Paul Greenberg

I think of something screenwriting guru Robert McKee said in a seminar I once attended. “You can tell a society in decline,” boomed McKee, “when spectacle replaces story.”

What story could be more profound and Odyssey-like than that of the mighty sturgeon, a fish that against all odds fights out of a natal creek, evades seabirds and bigger fish, enters the great ocean of life, feeds and learns and grows and returns to its home, sometimes 500 kilograms heavier than when it left, only to sniff out the sweet water of its birth and begin the cycle again.

And what could be more spectacle-like than an endless TikTok loop of caviar plopped on ice cream and devoured with a soundtrack of “ooos” and “mmms”?

We reach the second sampling site. Again, the nets are drawn in. Again, Higgs cranes her head over the lip of the webbing to see if perchance one of the great fish has come to grace us with her presence. Nothing.

I think about the distance swimmer Christopher Swain and the way the mangled sturgeon haunted him after his own epic New York swim. “Perhaps because we see ourselves as separate,” Swain wrote me, “we don’t hold space for and take good care of the other creatures with whom we share our waterways. I wonder, how would the Hudson look and feel if our goal were to live in right relationship with the river?”

We come to the third and final site, and I’ve all but put my notebook away. This will be one of those fish stories that I sometimes write where the absence of the fish makes its own point. “Where the Hero Never Ascends,” to paraphrase a chapter title from The Philosopher Fish.

But no!

The net cords are tight! The floats atop are shaking violently, and all at once, there she is. Two meters long, 90 kilograms, wrestling with all the kinetic energy needed to fight a river to its source. As the scientists lift her into the holding tank and measure her, I think that this is the real old-money aesthetic. This is the real quiet luxury. These diamond shields of cartilage running along her side, sculpted by the artisan of time itself. The adornments on her endlessly fascinating body make the foie gras and Périgord truffle studs on the 24K pizza seem embarrassingly trite. Such are the labors of humans when held up against the full flex of nature’s power.

I don’t know what to do with this image of pure, awesome life. I quit Instagram and my iPhone years ago. I never joined TikTok. I feel a desire to share this moment with someone special. Someone who has the rizz and the following to somehow convince the hoards on social media that this matters. That this fish was. That this fish is.

In truth, what I really wish is that Danielle the Caviar Queen could see this.

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