"Sea Urchin Caviar"

M. P. Moshkin

The Japanese live long and healthily - they remain active and alert long after the official retirement date. So it is not surprising that our nutrition specialists regard traditional Japanese food as being "packed" with extremely useful substances. Though, the Japanese themselves (including nutritionists and specialists in public health) often can hardly guess what extraordinary disease-curing properties are attributed to their food by their Russian colleagues.

And the more expensive the food is, the more beneficial it is supposed to be. For example, the quote unit price for the grey sea urchin harvesting is 6000 rubles (ca 200 US dollars), which is twice more expensive than that for the Pacific salmon and six times more expensive than that for squids. So from here the conclusion is drawn that eating sea urchin should be exclusively beneficial.

One can eat the eggs and roe of this prickly delicacy. In Japan it is called "uni", in Russian - "sea urchin caviar" (yes, not eggs, but caviar - the same word as for the salmon and sturgeon caviar!). Forty- fifty years ago one could easily buy "sea urchin caviar" at any seafood shop or fish stall in the former Soviet Union. Today most of the harvest is exported to Japan, where people, as we know, leave happily ever after.

More information on these and other subjects you can find in the printed version of our journal.