The Proposal

Project Lead: Meghan Donovan

Project Summary: An eco-friendly alternative to traditional roe harvesting practices

Description:

Caviar is a well-reputed delicacy. It is also a non-renewable resource—a sturgeon is killed for her eggs. The cost per kilogram for an Iranian beluga is, on average, $30,000. A more modest entry-level roe still runs more than $100 for an ounce. All twenty-six known sturgeon species are endangered. Time is running out for these gentle giants.

There is, as we know, no shortage of people.

Compare the cost of roe to the cost of a human egg: even considering the cost of surgery, treatment, and recovery, the cost caps around $5,000 for an egg donation. An artificial cap, meant to keep people from donating for the wrong reasons (which is tacitly understood to mean women shouldn’t donate as a way to keep themselves out of poverty, because donations are magnanimous and the monetary compensation is meant to cover time taken off to give the gift of eggs).

The purpose of this project is twofold: we empower women through letting them take monetary control of their wombs, and at the same time relieve the burden placed on the endangered sturgeon. It’s time for a new luxury.

Meghan Donovan, calculating, all smiles and bite, ends her presentation with a promise: And of course, she says to a room of uncomfortable, mostly male executives, I will also be donating to this endeavor.

The Execution

I _____________ (first name, last name) agree that the Donovan Trading Company (including its affiliates, officers, employees, agents, and successors (collectively, “Representatives”) may, but have no duty to, provide me, through medical personnel of their choice, customary medical or training assistance, transportation, and emergency medical services.

I assume the risk of physical injury, illness, or death and agree that my Participation shall at all times be at my own risk. I understand that due to the experimental nature of the egg harvesting process (from hereafter referred to as “Harvesting”), my internal organs (including, but not limited to, the uterus) may be damaged at any point over the course of the hormone treatment. I acknowledge that at the end of the Harvesting, my uterus will be removed (known as a full hysterectomy).

I understand the monetary compensation will come in four payments, with no potential for further compensation. Once harvested, I forfeit all claim to my eggs (from hereafter referred to as “Caviar”).

An ad goes out on a well-reputed medical testing site. Applications are taken by the hundreds, narrowed down to the dozens. Payments are agreed upon and waivers are signed.

Ten people sit in a waiting room, all with uteruses they don’t want, but hope to get something from besides a lifetime of cramping and backaches and hot flashes. For various reasons that none of them will discuss in polite company, they don’t want to use their eggs any other way. Not that they speak to one another; cold air pipes heavily into the waiting room, the kind of chill normally only found in standardized testing rooms, and the sound of the air conditioner whooshing makes it hard to talk at an appropriate volume. There’s more than enough space for all of them to maintain a distance of one seat between each person, so they do.

Anise would’ve donated her eggs the traditional way if she’d qualified. She knew guys in college who’d used sperm and blood donations to fund their hobbies: drinking, weed, 40k minis, Magic cards. It was all chump change compared to what she could get for her eggs if her family medical history hadn’t disqualified her. History of depression on both sides, high blood pressure, schizophrenia in one uncle. She’s still a few years from her own generalized anxiety diagnosis.

She wore her good interview shoes to this appointment, even though they pinch her toes and she’s already been chosen; she doesn’t want the doctor to think she’s not taking this seriously. She doesn’t touch any of the magazines—a collection of Nat Geos at least as old as she is, an Us Weekly from the first Bennifer breakup—but she doesn’t have an unlimited data plan on her phone and she didn’t ask for the Wi-Fi password when she entered. So mostly she just hopes she gets called soon.

A woman who looks older than Anise by at least a couple years smiles at her in a way that feels motherly, but this isn’t the kind of place for mothers so Anise looks just above the woman’s head and smiles back quickly—something friendly but not overly inviting.

The woman does take it as an invitation, and comes and sits in the previously empty seat between Anise and another stranger. The woman, Linda, wants to invite her into a group chat on Signal for all the testers to talk through their troubles together. They had all signed waivers that they wouldn’t talk about their experiences, lest it skew the data and they start to psychosomatically feel each other’s symptoms. Anise looks at the receptionist with concern, who looks bored.

Dr. Alan will never find out, Linda says, and the reassurance in her voice soothes Anise.

The Dosage 

[redacted]

Every day for six weeks, a shot to the ass administered under Dr. Alan’s watchful eye. A cocktail of estrogen, human growth hormone, and several proprietary ingredients meant to induce hyper-fecundity and increase the egg size enough to be consumable, he explains to Maria when she asks what it is, exactly, that she’s being shot with.

Two weeks in and she feels like a pin cushion; she looks at herself in the mirror, turning this way and that to catch a glimpse of the bruises, some fresh and some already yellowing, splotched against her stretch marks, which also seem to be reddening with new growth. The bruises remind her of things she’d rather forget, but at least they don’t look like hands. I was almost ready to wear shorts again, she laments to her crusty white dog before she goes to these appointments. She bikes to them, but she plans to buy a used Civic once the final payment comes through, quit her barista gig, and take a road trip down south. Somewhere with a beach. Miami if she can get rid of some of the stretch marks, Myrtle Beach if she can’t.

And then, because she is still nodding absently, Dr. Alan elaborates. The average uterus drops two eggs per cycle, Dr. Alan says as he daubs the alcohol swab against her bare skin, but contains thousands. All that product just going to waste, he says jovially, but Maria doesn’t believe he’s joking. A human ovum is one-tenth of a millimeter in size. Compare that to the sturgeon’s roe: three millimeters. The treatment intends to make the eggs drop all at once, but also make them large enough to be worth harvesting. His nitrile gloves squeak as he pulls them off. Any other questions?

How long is it going to hurt?

Dr. Alan puts on the same placating customer service smile Maria does when she has to tell someone that they don’t serve almond milk, and says, you haven’t seen the worst of it yet, darling.

The Side Effects

Including, but not limited to:

Infertility (guaranteed)

Nausea

Pain at injection site

Severe pelvic pain

Headaches

Hot flashes

Cramping

Hormonal mood swings (discontinue Participation if mood swings worsen or lead to suicidal thoughts)

Nightmares

Linda dreams of watching herself laid out on a table (temperature-controlled, chilled like a refrigerator) while Dr. Alan saws her open with a butchering knife. He’s going to harvest her eggs and then give her the hysterectomy, like she signed the waiver for. She wants this, she knows that even in the dream, because three kids later she can’t find a doctor willing to tie her tubes, but she can’t help but squirm and pull away from the knife as it comes down against her. She tastes salt, like maybe she’s crying; beneath the table the ocean churns blackly and Dr. Alan floats just above the water’s surface, patiently sawing. He cuts through sagging skin and shiny muscle and then he finds the old sutures from her C-Section where Taylor had to be pulled because she was breech, and as he rips the thread loose it becomes fishing wire, shiny plastic, and all the eggs that spill out glisten silver, bubble out from her as they pour into the dark waters.

Packaging

Image Description: ETHICALLY SOURCED splays across the black-and-gold label, which features a woman’s French-manicured hand holding a mother-of-pearl spoon upon which sits a pile of glossy white eggs (not to scale).

A glass jar, weighing two ounces, containing one ounce of product. The label doesn’t say from whom these particular eggs came from. The label does recommend serving the caviar over blini.

When Emmy sees the jar mockup on the website, she kind of expects it to be like those organic dairy bottles where it has the cow’s name and picture on the side and when it doesn’t, she’s a little disappointed that she won’t be able to pick out a jar of her own. Not to like, eat, but as a souvenir, a morbid little thing to keep on the shelf. Or maybe send it to her mom; they’d gotten in enough arguments about Emmy’s child-free lifestyle, maybe she’d finally get the message if she saw a jar with her daughter’s smiling face and grossly over-sized eggs. But no, just a nice close up of a beautiful hand, nothing to suggest the true nature of the caviar.

The French-manicured hand holding the mother-of-pearl spoon looks like Meghan Donovan’s—Emmy had met her at the end-of-harvest party a few weeks back, which she’d been too sore to really enjoy, and maybe she was just still moody from all the extra hormones, but she hated seeing her own bitten-down fingernails and picked-to-bleeding cuticles next to Meghan’s manicure. Meghan was a people person, and she must have sensed Emmy’s mood, because she said she knew how Emmy felt, and Emmy nodded, even though she didn’t believe her, didn’t think this rich woman was wearing a Depends under her artfully draped wrap dress. Meghan cut like a shark from person to person, offering congratulations on making history with her. This product is like my baby, Emmy heard her say over and over.

Marketing

A woman emerges naked from the water, covered only by seafoam. The camera zooms in on her face, then pans lower, centering the gaze on her dripping navel. The ocean was our first home, she says.

In their separate homes, they watch the commercial premier and in the group chat they try to figure out who’s who as smiling actress after smiling actress spoons caviar into botoxed mouths. It doesn’t seem like there's any direct matches, and there were other women harvested besides their little Wednesday morning group, but it's fun to guess anyway.

Someone on a bike. Thats u Mari11

Linda in the park with the kids!

Who the fuck is that supposed to be at the party?

Meghan

You’d look good in that dress, Isla

We should dress up when we try it.

Controversy

What’s to stop you from just cutting off your finger and eating that?

It’s more akin to breast milk donation, really. Did you know they’re making breast milk cheese now?

I’d rather eat my finger than breast milk cheese.

Feels like a fetish thing.

Ever heard of prion disease?

Fox News calls it Women’s Rights Gone Too Far. The liberals aren’t just aborting the babies, they’re eating them.

CNN calls it the Commodification of Women.

The Atlantic asks if it’s cannibalism.

Aiden watches with his girlfriend and tries not to flinch when Meghan Donovan (shiny, infectious smile) and the Dr. Alan stand-in (twenty years younger than the real thing and with a full head of hair) go on a Dr. Oz-type talk show. Meghan speaks about her personal experience running the project and participating in it, how she needed to set the standard. She feels Empowered by what her Womanhood can do. Earth Mother Goddess vibes. Fake-Dr.Alan talks about the other outstanding women providing this resource. Like they were ending world hunger and not just feeding rich people their weird rich people shit.

But tucked against Aiden, his girl feels it when he stiffens, even though he’s under a thousand layers of sweater and binder.

This is bullshit, she says, pulling herself tighter into him. Dumb fuckers.

It’s fine, he lies. It’s whatever. Free hysterectomy. It’s gonna pay for my T for a year straight. It’s gonna pay for top surgery. I’ll live.

It feels like taking three steps back to take two forward, but it’s still forward, maybe. He wants to enjoy the cosmic irony of backsliding into the self he escaped to become the self he needs to be. He wants to cry, but he tells himself it’s just because of the hormones. That it’ll be out of his system soon.

Taste Test

A bold, robust flavor with a touch of saltiness and a smooth, buttery finish.

They coordinate in the group chat and Venmo money to Isla so she can use her Whole Foods employee discount to get two jars. She still almost has a heart attack when she sees the cost, and she sheepishly plays it off as curiosity when the coworker ringing her up raises a skeptical eyebrow—she hadn’t told anyone at work what she was doing for the extra money to pay for her brother’s insulin.

They meet on a Sunday, squeezed into old prom dresses and thrifted gowns and the one suit Aiden owned from an old Doctor Who cosplay.

Isla’s never eaten caviar, but she looked up a guide on how to serve it and eat it before she invited everyone over. Carefully, they spoon it up onto the prepackaged blini from the Eastern-European corner shop (the blini look to Isla like the mini Eggo pancakes she’d make for herself and her brother before school).

  So, you’re supposed to kind of roll it out on your tongue, Isla tells them as they huddle over the coffee table in her studio apartment. She’s starting to forget the steps that she memorized. Bite down on them one by one. Good caviar is … salty?

There’s a chorus of hmmm’s in various high and low and questioning tones. None of them want to admit it tastes like wet tissue and copper and bland pancake.

A New Venture

Donovan Trading Company would like to thank all consumers for their interest in our limited run ethically sourced and eco-friendly caviar. At this time, we have no plans for a second run, but sign up for our newsletter to stay on the cutting edge of Donovan Trading Company’s food innovations!

As controversy drops off so does the demand, but the market is still there. The recipe for the proprietary drug cocktail is discovered, or something close enough to it, allowing other sources of human caviar to crop up in Mexico, Brazil, Russia, India, China. It gets cheaper as the market becomes globalized. The ethically sourced label gets stickered over with a tag advertising the bigger and better 5 oz size.