Whatever happened to caviar? In the 80s, it was all we talked we about. There was a high symbolic vibration around the stuff. As kids, we were all convinced it was disgusting. Ew! Fish eggs?! So gross! People really eat that?! Oh – just rich people? Why do rich people eat it? Why are they so weird?
Caviar was the ultimate sign of wealth – expensive and silly.
But it was the 80s and more people aspired to wealth in a caviar way so it may be that caviar had slipped down the slide of downward mobility as more people became upwardly mobile. You never hear about caviar anymore. It either became more commonplace and something rarer replaced it. (What would that be?) Or the rich stopped talking about it.
Or the internationalization of culture kicked in. . .after all, we started actually eating sushi in America instead of making fun of it. We had more direct lines to Russia, where the caviar came from. The world has shifted and caviar dreams are less rarified than they were then. Caviar seems to have gone a bit out of fashion.
The Hamlet Project 