How could Romney have missed it?

Jesus Farking Crutch. I like caviar (osetra is my foavorite) but this is such a farking disgusting display of money-burning that everyone involved should be cooked and eaten...at haste!

Caviar is to be enjoyed slowly and shared with a fast woman.

caviar sucks.

/just thought I would share

ardere: Approve.

Came for this!

I'm just like you all. I love watching those eating contests... you know the one that they show every year... with those guys eating those... umm, hot dogs. Yeah... at Coney Island, I think. Yeah, that looks real fun. It's a great American tradition... I've never tried it, but just like everyone here, I think that's swell. In fact, I'm actually planning on participating in an eating contest in the near future...

That's not class, it's just gluttony in the fullest sense of the word. Not only is it eating too much, it's gourmandizing and eating too much. The delicacy, rarity, and expense of the food makes the sin of gluttony all the more wasteful and disgusting, like those Roman millionaires who ate themselves and their vast fortunes to death. In Rome, such behaviour was only justified by the tyranny of the Emperors and their spies--the aristocracy was reduced to powerless slaves, living in terror, and able to find comfort in nothing, safety in nothing, but excess and suicide. If they were lucky, their suicide would protect their fortunes or some of their fortunes for their heirs and assigns, who might well be adopted since they didn't dare or care to reproduce themselves.

They were sad sacks in gilded cages. Similar outbursts of excess correlate strongly with periods of decay in the upper classes--when Louix XIV and his brilliant ministers gathered all the power in France into their own hands and gave the aristocracy as much rope as they needed to hang themselves womanizing, gambling and stabbing each other in the back at Court--provided they were a Court. Court was a gilded prison where Louis was the Warden. You had to ask his permission to marry. You had to ask his permission to leave. Banishment was, as in Rome, the worst punishment, worse even than death. You were nobody except as you danced attendance on the One Font of all Honour and Power and Influence and Wealth. Louis XIV was lavish in his entertainments and in his forgiveness of gambling debts--he liberally paid for favourites who lost large and he liberally endowed favourites who married and produced children, but these strings were like the favours of the Godfather--more strings were attached to every string. It was a web in which your every move was checked and recorded, with Louix XIV the spider at the centre of the web.

The same is true of Russia and always has been. The Czar (whatever his title) had power of life and death over every business and every person, every estate and every luxury. He could kill a luxury. Even Presidents can't do that. Imagine if Obama really tried to kill gasoline with punitive taxes. Imagine if he ever tried to take away guns from the masses, let alone the classes who control the masses. Not possible. Not thinkable, except as a lie to the masses, of course. If any US President ever manages to take the car keys away from US citizens, you will really have yourself a dictator and a mighty powerful one at that. It's just inconceivable. You might as well try to pry doughnuts from their cold dead hands.

Some people have noticed that the rich love to eat the junk parts of animals--the bits that no peasant would eat. This is a combination of factors. One, those who sell the meats lose money on every ounce they can turn to a profit, so they use tremendous cunning to make the inedible bits or the unappetizing bits fashionable and palatable. This involves a lot of processing and disguise, which of course makes these bits more costly than the good bits that the peasants would like to eat but can't afford, and which the middle classes can afford as well as the rich. When the markeeters and advertisers succeed, they have a whole new revenue stream which exploits the rich (and some others, such as criminals or snobs or demented people) and is guaranteed against collapse (until the fashion changes) because the poor not only can't eat these bits but don't want to, knowing full well that they are doomed to buy the cheaper cuts and the organ meats and make them tasty and healthy through their own inventiveness.

Of course, once they have figured out how to make the cheap bits tasty and healthy, the rich and the middle classes are likely to move in and work up their own super-costly versions, which makes it all the harder for the poor to eat.

All high class food is poor peasant food writ large, with a bill to match.

The rich also can be tricked into eating anything that is rare or comes from far away, whether it is tasty or not. The further fetched it is, the better.

Machismo plays a role as well. While aristocrats are mostly soldiers and priests, the governing classes in other words, the middle classes and sizeable portions of the upper classes lead lives of quiet civility and tedium. They lack the rough and tumble which separates the men from the toy boys. But food snobbery allows you to exploit people's natural preference for sweet over sour and bitter, for example. Think of all the nasty foods that are luxuries: olives, pickles, thousand year old eggs, coffee that has been through the digestive track of a civet, and so forth. It is a brave man who first ate a lobster, says an old proverb. Well, yes. Or a very hungry peasant. But the brave man was showing off and the peasant was praying it wouldn't kill him. The brave man probably knew the peasant and thus knew that it was going to kill him. Machismo loves sports and risks that look riskier than they are. Rich people don't like risks that deform or kill them. They just want risks that are impressive, like betting $500,000 on a hand of poker.

I've had caviar of various kinds, ranging from nasty lompfish to the real deal, en passant par salmon roe and even lobster eggs. Meh. It's not really something you'd choose as a snack if it was the same price as say, potato chips or cheddar cheese. It's mostly water with a bit of saltiness and fishiness, a sort of bubble-like roundness. It takes fashion and snob appeal to make it a treat, otherwise you would probably prefer tapioca pudding.

brantgoose: Some people have noticed that the rich love to eat the junk parts of animals--the bits that no peasant would eat.

Does it taste better than the sour grapes you're having?