Oyster Read online

  Country

  Bushels

  Value

  United States

  26,853,760

  £2,533,481

  Canada

  134,140

  £43,405

  Great Britain and Ireland

  113,700

  £154,722

  France

  3,260,190

  £716,778

  Holland

  100,000

  £84,400

  Italy

  68,750

  £44,000

  Other European countries

  29,930

  £40,250

  Asia, Africa and Oceania

  275,000

  £111,400

  Total

  30,835,470

  £3,728,436

  In 1911 the United States was the biggest global producer of oysters, followed by France and then by ‘Asia, Africa and Oceania’. Now China and Japan dominate the world’s oyster production, with 80 per cent of the total produce.

  Postcard showing the Whitstable oyster fleet on a calm morning in the 1930s.

  Methods of oyster cultivation have evolved from country to country. In Japan, oyster culture began centuries ago as an off-shoot of the Japanese or Manila clam industry, particularly around Hiroshima on the northern shore of the Seto inland sea. Clams were grown in shallow-water enclosures surrounded by short fences of interlaced bamboo stalks, called shibi. The leaves and stems of the shibi collected the larvae of Pacific oysters and the Japanese oyster fishermen soon realized that oysters would yield greater profits than the clams. By the early twentieth century Japanese oyster farmers had adopted hanging-culture techniques that continue today: oyster farmers suspend lengths of rope threaded with clam shells from bamboo rafts floating in the shallows of bays and inlets. Hiroshima still produces 60 percent of Japan’s total production of oysters and has a popular annual oyster festival in February.

  Dredging for oysters and bringing them ashore at Whitstable on the Kent coast in Victorian times, from the Illustrated London News.

  In France the great oyster territories are on Brittany’s Atlantic coast, which has the bays, coves and estuaries needed for successful cultivation. Most come from Locmariaquer in Morbihan. In 1581 the essayist Michel de Montaigne visited Bordeaux on parliamentary business and recorded:

  They brought us oysters in baskets. They are so agreeable, and of so high an order of taste, that it is like smelling violets to eat them; moreover they are so healthy, a valet gobbled up more than a hundred without any disturbance.9

  When oyster production went into decline in Europe in the 1850s due to over-consumption, Monsieur Jean Jacques Marie Cyprien Victor Coste, Professor of Embryology at the Collège de France, was employed by the French government to investigate new methods of production. His research began with a journey around the coasts of France and Italy and a journey back in time to discover the history of Italian and Roman oyster-farming methods. Near Naples he found methods of oyster farming that had been in use since Roman times. In the Lake of Fusaro, a shallow lagoon lying between Lake Lucrino and Cape Miseno, he discovered two methods being practised for farming oysters that had been depicted centuries before on Roman vases. In the first, oyster farmers built mounds of stones on the shore, which were encircled by stakes of wood driven into the sea-bed to keep off predators. In the second method, oyster farmers suspended faggots on ropes strung between stakes in the lagoon.

  Oyster cultivation in the 19th century at Lago del Fusaro, a coastal lagoon near Naples.

  A ‘faggot’ or bunch of sticks on which oyster spat grow. These are either suspended or anchored in shallow lagoons.

  In 1855 Coste published his findings in Voyage d’exploration sur le littoral de la France et de l’Italie, recommending that these techniques be adopted in the French oyster-beds under Government supervision. Ambitious for the French oyster industry and concerned about its decline, Coste wrote a report in February 1858 addressed directly to Napoleon III asking for 6–8,000 francs to experiment in restocking with oysters the Bay of Brieuc on the north coast of Brittany. He proposed growing oysters using the suspended faggot method, much greater regulation of the dredging of the oyster-beds, and a careful mapping and surveillance of the oyster growing areas of the coast. He claimed that if his proposals were adopted the coast of France would become one long chain of oyster-beds.

  Oyster farmer repairing an oyster dike on the Pacific coast of America in the 1930s. Oyster dikes are constructed to control water depth and levels of sedimentation.

  Napoleon III had imperial ambitions for himself and for France and he looked to the Roman Empire for his inspiration. In 1853 he had appointed Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann to rebuild Paris. By the time Napoleon received Victor Coste’s letter outlining his ambitions for the French oyster industry, Haussmann was busy laying arterial road systems, widening streets, designing new water supplies and sewer systems, and building new bridges, public buildings and parks. The emperor granted Coste the money he asked for his oyster experiment in Brieuc, for he believed in investing in economic enterprises. If European oyster production was in decline, the French would find ways of reinvigorating it.10 An imperial reputation was at stake.

  Oyster platforms in 19th-century France.

  The experiment in Brieuc was a success, Coste reported a few years later, for there had been a rich harvest of spat: 20,000 young oysters had grown on a single submerged faggot. Coste recommended the immediate restocking of the French coastline along the principles he had developed in Brieuc: a French oyster empire stretching around the colonial territories from Algeria to Corsica as well as along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. The farms would be divided into lots granted to only the most energetic seamen. Oyster farming flourished in Arcachon, south of Bordeaux, and in the Gulf of Morbihan on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, and, certainly by the end of the nineteenth century, France held her own as one of the world’s leading oyster producers.

  During the nineteenth century oyster industries in America flourished along the north-west coast and in Louisiana and around Chesapeake Bay, where oyster canning also developed into a major industry in the second half of the century.

  These colourfully labelled oyster tins from the USA, mostly dating from the 1890s to the 1930s, are now collectors’ items. Seafood packers near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland filled the tins with raw oysters then shipped them around the world.

  The anonymous author of Lucullus; or, Palatable Essays, wrote: ‘An oyster bed is a pleasure – an El Dorado – a mine of wealth, in fact, which fills the owner’s pockets with gold and affords to the million untold gastronomical enjoyment and healthy food’.11 But by the time this book was published in 1878, oyster production around the world was in decline and no efforts by naturalists with imperial ambitions could stop that decline. Sewage pollution in European waters resulted in a series of large-scale and widely publicized food poisonings in the early twentieth century, after which trade in home-grown oysters and imports fell by 50 per cent. Flat oysters (Ostrea species; those that spawn inside their shells) had been decimated by disease and pollution around European, Asian and American shorelines. In the twentieth century, however, oyster farmers turned to the Pacific oyster (Crassostrea species; those that spawn outside their shells) as an attempt to restock oyster-farms. After the Second World War, European oyster farmers found ways of breeding these oysters in hatcheries. By controlling the water temperature, oyster breeders could induce Crassostrea to spawn in any month of the year and then the spat could be sold to oyster farmers in less warm climates who could then re-lay the oysters on the foreshore.

  Oysters being shipped by barge on the Pacific coast of America in the 1930s.

  One such story of experiment and investment is told by Richard Pinney, oyster grower of Orford, who came to Suffolk from London in the 1940s. Sailing his small boat around the Suffolk coast in ‘search of safety and rest’ in the last days of the Second World War, he found Orford,
‘bomb-scarred and down at heel’, where he ate fried oysters and bacon at the Trust House. Having bought a derelict cottage by the side of Butley Creek, where he could moor his boat, he turned his mind to ways of making a living. Ten years or so later, having tried his hand at fishing, fish smoking and the production of rush matting, he determined ‘to restore Orford’s reputation for oysters’.12 First he ordered in 20,000 young flat oyster spat from Brittany, which arrived at Victoria Station and which he shipped back to Orford in his Land Rover, laying them on prepared beds in Butley Creek. At the same time he began negotiations with Portuguese oyster growers, finally making a deal with the shipping line to take 120 tons of Crassostrea spat. In return they would sail the ship round from Lisbon to Setebul to load the spat to avoid having to drive them across land.

  A drill-dredge in position for work.

  But Pinney’s entrepreneurship was dogged by bad luck. The young Portuguese oysters, contained in baskets on deck, were sailed into the British port as a dock strike began. Pinney knew his oysters’ lives were at stake:

  I took the train up to London in a very sombre mood. I went straight from Liverpool Street Station to the Guildhall Library, where I checked some lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar which had come into my mind, and I composed a telegram to our MP, Colonel (later Sir) Harwood Harrison. It said . . . Three million lives at stake in London docks stop blame Government’s handling of labour troubles stop quote I tell you that which you yourselves do know would I could put a tongue in every wound end quote.

  Removing the oysters from their shells, a process known as oyster shucking in the USA.

  When this strategy didn’t work, Pinney went to his solicitors, the RSPCA and finally the Press. His marooned young oysters made headline news and as a result the dockers volunteered to break their strike to save the oysters, offering to give their earnings to charity. Pinney’s rescued and now famous oysters were soon ashore and being transported east to the Orford estuary. There had been hidden benefits, Pinnney realized: ‘Orford as an oyster centre, after all this publicity, was once again well on the map’.13 However, his bad luck returned a few years later: the winter of 1962–3 was severe and the ice in the river suffocated almost all of his oysters, both flat and Pacific. By this point, however, the first generation of transmigrated oysters from Portugal who had broken the London dockers’ strike had all been eaten. It was their descendants who died in the ice.

  Picking oysters today, from the Pacific oyster beds in the US.

  Although Pinney restocked his beds with Pacific oysters after the losses of the 1962 winter, he decided to try another experiment in the early 1970s with a new Pacific oyster, the Crassostrea gigas, which had recently arrived from Japan; it grew to adulthood more quickly and showed resistance to cold water. It had been imported as spat and cultivated in America since the 1920s.14 The Japanese oysters flourished in the waters of the creek but, because the oysters wouldn’t spawn in his own cold waters, Pinney had to buy and import new spat every year. In an attempt to avoid having to pay out for annual imports of spat, he began to design and plan his own hatchery, building two pits alongside the river which looked like small swimming baths filled by sea water warmed by electricity. Then he began to experiment with producing algae, and with altering water temperatures and salinity. He recalls watching the spat he had hatched under a microscope:

  One of us would be peering in and they would be peering out, confronting us, eyeball to magnified eyeball, along the barrel of the microscope. At least, that was how it seemed. As well as eyes, they grew ‘feet’. It was as if they were preparing to escape, to spy out the land, and hoof it!15

  The oyster harvest in the 1930s. These men from the Pacific coast of the US carry tonguing tools.

  The hatchery experiment, however, proved to be more troublesome, labour-intensive and expensive than it was worth. Eventually the Pinneys decided to continue to buy their spat from dedicated hatcheries. Oyster labour was, by the 1970s, generally divided across Europe and Asia between those who worked in hatcheries and those who relaid the imported spat in oyster-beds.

  Pinney’s story of oyster cultivation is one of continual evolution and adaptation, a story that covers a period of only 20 or 30 years, but during which the oyster farmer had to make changes to his stock, try out new techniques, invest in spat and deal with decimations to his stock caused by natural disasters such as cold winters, and human difficulties such as dock strikes. Though oyster industries have been industrialized to some extent over the last hundred years and have had to respond to new health and safety and food production regulations, a large number of the finest oysters produced on the shores and bays of Europe, Japan, China and America, whether grown suspended from bamboo rafts or on tiles or on muddy estuary beds, are grown in small-scale oyster-farms run by oyster farmers such as Richard Pinney using techniques that – in principle at least – are not dissimilar to those of Sergius Orata.

  Ways of setting tiles for oyster-growing in France.

  3 The Rise and Fall of the Oyster

  In the first century AD, the Spanish-born Roman poet Martial wrote an epigram addressed to his patron, Ponticus, complaining about the poorer food that his patron served to his lower status guests at his banquets. Ponticus reserved his Lucrine oysters for himself and his most important guests; there were to be no oysters for the poet:

  Now I get a proper invitation to dinner since my days as a paid entertainer are past, why am I given a different dinner from you? You feed on big fat oysters from the Lucrine lagoon; I’m left sucking mussel shells and split lips. You get the choicest mushrooms, I get fungus pigs won’t touch. You toy with turbot; I’m down there with the catfish. You stuff yourself with fine roast peacock, its rump indecently plump; laid out on my plate is the kitchen canary’s corpse – found dead of old age in its cage. Why don’t we dine together, Ponticus, when I come to dinner with you? No longer being hired to come could be a step up the social ladder – if we supped the same.1

  The oyster has been by turns the food of the rich, the food of the poor and the food of the bohemian epicure at different times in human history. For Ponticus, oysters transported to Rome from the Lucrine lagoon were expensive and in short supply, so to be able to serve them at all was a mark of his social standing and his wealth. However, because the early Japanese and Chinese learned to smoke and dry their farmed oysters, they could be added to much more ordinary dishes far inland, away from the sea. Smoked and dried oysters were ubiquitous and easily available in Asia; serving them to guests was not therefore a mark of social standing as serving raw oysters was for the Romans. In other early cultures oysters were a subsistence food: when other food supplies were low they would be harvested straight from the rocks and cooked on open fires on the beach. They had no price. For these people oysters were a fall-back food, not a delicacy.

  A London oyster stall in 1864.

  As techniques of oyster cultivation developed hundreds of years later in the nineteenth century, and the expanding railway network made it possible to transport large numbers of oysters from the sea-beds straight into the rapidly expanding cities, market prices declined sufficiently for oysters to become a subsistence food for the urban poor. For several decades cheap oysters flooded the food markets of Europe. When excessive farming, over-consumption, pollution and the spread of oyster diseases inevitably depleted the oyster supplies of Europe in the late nineteenth century, prices rose steeply.

  But factors other than availability and efficiency of transport and refrigeration have affected the oyster’s oscillations of status. Changing fashions in food consumption and taste have also played a part. Who eats oysters and where and when? On the street at an oyster stall at midnight, in an oyster tavern cellar for breakfast with friends, in a private inner room as part of an elaborate seduction ritual, or at a banquet laid out with a 100 cut-glass goblets and fine silver? What has it meant to eat oysters? And what have they meant to men and women as food at different times in history and in di
fferent countries?

  When the Romans left Britain around AD 400, the oyster lost its status as a delicacy. For several centuries they were rarely eaten, but by the early eighth century they had returned to favour. In the Old English Exeter Book first made public in 1072 by Leofric, first bishop of Exeter, Riddle no. 77 is an oyster:

  The deep sea suckled me, the waves sounded over me; waves were my coverlet as I rested on my bed. I have no feet and frequently open my mouth to the flood. Sooner or later some man will consume me, who cares nothing for my shell. With the point of his knife he will pierce me through, ripping the skin away from my side, and straight away eat me uncooked as I am.