Farm Raised Sea Urchin

Farm Raised Sea Urchin

The farm-raised sea urchin I ate in Japan was much more expensive than the ones I ate in California. They cost around $8 each, and were served in a sushi restaurant.

I had never eaten farm-raised sea urchin before. The ones I had eaten before were caught wild and shipped from California to Japan, where they are considered a delicacy. I didn't know much about how sea urchin farming worked, but I imagined it was something Japanese fishermen did to pass the time during the winter months when there was nothing else to catch.

After the meal, my host told me that the sea urchins we had just eaten were farmed off the coast of New Zealand and then shipped to Japan for us to eat.

It seems like a lot of trouble to go through to eat some sea urchins. But it's not nearly as hard as trying to farm them yourself.

What is the rarest thing you can eat? The answer depends on your definition of rare. If you mean "can't get easily at a supermarket," then the answer is purple cauliflower. If you mean "not many people have eaten this," then maybe it's acorn barnacles, or sea urchin, or kung pao chicken liver.

But there is one thing that's harder to get than any of those. It's one of the most expensive food products in the world, and it comes from an animal that lives for about a day and a half. It's caviar from farm-raised sea urchin.

The story begins with Louis Voight, a marine biologist who thought he knew all about sea urchin until he got dragged into the misguided attempt to raise them commercially in the early 1980s. Urchin are weird creatures. They're not fish; they're actually more closely related to starfish and sand dollars. They live on rocky coasts all over the world, and they feed on algae by scraping it off rocks with their teeth, which are structures made out of calcite (the same stuff as marble) called Aristotle's lanterns.