Cashmere and other luxuries for the holidays

I went online to order some smoked salmon and bagels to ship to my brother in California and discovered that it’s so expensive, I could just as easily ship him some caviar and champagne. 

That led me to thinking about luxurious edible gifts for the holidays and whether there are any health benefits that we could use to justify the purchase and consumption of foods we don’t need.

The short answer is basically no. 

Champagne? It’s fun and can be affordable these days but we try not to tout alcohol to our readers on the health page (although of course if you drink responsibly and moderately, you will be just fine). 

You could make a case for foie gras being sort of good for you, but it’s impossible to think of foie gras without thinking about the cruel process by which it’s made. I’m not really all that sentimental and it’s possible I might eat foie gras without guilt but I certainly could never recommend it to other people as a splurge. Too cruel. 

And once you get into that mindset, really, caviar? It’s little tiny eggs harvested from a pregnant mother fish. Again, I’m not really very sentimental and I might end up eating caviar over the holidays. But I can’t really recommend that other people treat living creatures so cruelly for a non-necessity food (and let’s be honest, the beef and poultry industries aren’t exactly wonderful to the living creatures we end up cooking and eating).

There was some talk in 2014 about harvesting caviar without killing the fish first; the idea was to massage the eggs out just before they would have been laid anyway (perhaps with the help of a doula). I wasn’t able to find any sources for what was being marketed as “cruelty-free caviar,” but honestly I didn’t look exhaustively.

What I did look for exhaustively is cashmere. And yes, cashmere is not edible. It does have a place here on the health page, however, because the cashmere market seems to be suffering from the impact of our increasingly warm winters. 

Cashmere is a true luxury item in the sense that it can’t really be farm-raised. There are special goats raised in Mongolia and China and their bodies produce the best, long fibers when the weather is horrendously cold.  Longer fibers make softer yarn that doesn’t pill (pilling refers to those little balls that start to pop up on your less expensive, short-fiber fabrics after a few months of wear).

At the same time that the quality of cashmere has been decreasing, the demand for it has risen exponentially. Companies such as Uniqlo are selling decent quality cashmere for under $100. 

The starting price for a high-quality cashmere sweater is about $300. I’m not much of a label snob but even I can see and feel the difference between my $80 Uniqlo cashmere and a more expensive version. 

The high demand for cashmere combined with the warming climate has created a dip in the quality of the sweaters you can buy. In addition to the fibers being shorter, a really good sweater used to be made with two or three layers of yarn; now most cashmere is single ply. 

One business article on cashmere that I read while researching this article suggested buying from a company called Everlane, which Lakeville Journal Associate Editor Alexander Wilburn said all well-heeled young people already know about. Everlane sells Class A cashmere at Uniqlo prices (a cashmere turtleneck costs $120, the V-necks and crew necks for men and women are $100; the prices rise and fall depending on the market price of the raw cashmere and they are at a relative low point now, so it’s worth checking out the Everlane website). 

Cashmere is still a relatively cruelty-free luxury. So is silk, which is not as much of a 21st-century fabric, although silk undergarments are still considered the warmest thing going. For coats, of course, fur is extremely warm but, again, cruel. 

This is the age of microfibers and technical fabrics. Everything that’s made in a factory on the planet has consequences. This is a judgment free article; choose to buy whatever luxuries you want for Christmas. But for me, cashmere might be the most luxurious, most humanistic holiday gift around.