鱼子酱便宜到可以喂两岁的小孩了：一个很大的原因是中国的养鱼场

Let's put two prices side by side.

At a high-end caviar shop in New York, a 125-gram tin of classic Osetra costs four hundred and ninety-five dollars.

The same shop's top-grade Osetra, in the same quantity, comes to nearly three thousand dollars.

Now look at another set of figures.

A new brand selling direct online lists 100 grams of Osetra at a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

Another new brand, running a promotion, took 125 grams from three hundred and forty-six dollars down to a hundred and thirty-eight.

Within a single category, the price gap reaches more than tenfold.

That gap is now unsettling a market long dictated by a handful of established names.

To understand how this happened, you first have to understand why caviar was expensive.

Caviar is sturgeon roe after it has been cured with salt.

The sturgeon is an extraordinarily ancient fish; it predates the dinosaurs.

Its growth cycle is long, and a single sturgeon needs many years before it can spawn.

Which means the supply of caviar cannot be scaled up quickly, as a matter of physics.

With supply constrained, the price naturally stayed high.

But it is worth noting that caviar has not always been a luxury.

In nineteenth-century America, bars would sometimes offer it free as a bar snack.

What pushed it into the high-price bracket was a chain of later events.

In the 1990s the Soviet Union dissolved, and Caspian caviar prices crashed for a period.

Falling prices triggered unrestrained fishing, and wild sturgeon populations shrank rapidly.

A number of countries then banned the catching of wild sturgeon.

Today, the overwhelming majority of caviar circulating in the American market is farmed.

The real turning point has come in the last decade, and the turning point is in China.

Over the past ten-odd years, China began farming sturgeon at scale.

Sturgeon farming is a business that demands patience, because you have to wait for the fish to mature.

Now, that generation of fish has matured.

Chinese producers of enormous scale have emerged.

They supply the new online brands on one side and Michelin-starred restaurants on the other.

An author who has written specifically about caviar describes it fairly bluntly.

She says: there is a great deal of Chinese caviar on the market now, much of it extremely cheap, and much of it of very good quality.

When a supply-constrained category suddenly stops being constrained, the price structure begins to loosen.

What the new entrants have changed is the entire mode of presentation; price is merely the most visible part of it.

The old brands' packaging is black and gold, conveying formality and rarity.

The new brands' tins are pink and bright yellow, conveying ease and the everyday.

They advertise on social platforms, offer discount codes, free delivery, even holiday gift sets.

Those words would almost never have appeared in the same sentence as caviar in the past.

The target customer is completely different too.

A Miami brand's core customer is women aged twenty-five to forty-five.

A co-founder of a Boston brand has observed something: some young women who are drinking less have started treating caviar as a substitute small indulgence.

The co-founder of the Miami brand mentions customers who have repurchased six to eight times within a year.

That brand's positioning for itself is a slogan: the People's Caviar.

Within the industry, the welcome is not unanimous.

The head of partnerships at that high-priced New York shop offers a warning.

He says: if caviar is abnormally cheap, the consumer should be on guard — it may be too good to be true.

But the opposite explanation is equally persuasive.

A professor who studies high-end brands points out that many brands price high simply because this category has long been priced that way.

He believes what these new brands have done is call the whole trade's bluff.

Both readings have merit, and they are not mutually exclusive.

Some cheap caviar really is of questionable quality, and some expensive caviar really is expensive only by convention.

Finally, back to specific people, because that is where the meaning of a price change actually lives.

A thirty-three-year-old woman lives in a small town in the American south, bakes bread, and writes caviar reviews on social media.

She says: for a long stretch of time, caviar belonged only to people inside that circle.

I live in the countryside, and there are no European delis near me.

Now she can eat it at home, and her favourite way is on an ordinary weeknight, in a robe, before a bath.

A thirty-four-year-old woman used to eat caviar only on special occasions in restaurants.

Now she and her husband can enjoy it more freely, and she has even given her two-year-old daughter a spoonful.

That child's reaction was three words: more, more, more.

Pull back from the whole thing and it is not only about a food.

Sometimes a thing is expensive because it is genuinely scarce in physical terms.

Sometimes it is expensive only because everyone assumes by default that it ought to be.

Those two kinds of expensive look identical on the shelf, and the answer only emerges when someone brings the price down.

What China's fish farms have done is precisely the bringing of that answer into the open.

Now put yourself in it.

Something you have always felt you could not afford suddenly becomes affordable.

Do you go and buy it immediately, or do you doubt it first?