Oyster beds spread as demand multiplies
$40M industry employs thousands
NEW YORK — “Everyone’s growing oysters,” Chris Quartuccio says over his shoulder as he paddles a neon-orange kayak across Long Island’s Great South Bay, where he’s raising some 300,000 Blue Island oysters on the shallow sea floor, 80 kilometres east of Manhattan. He might be right.
Close to a hundred oyster farms have sprung up during the past decade or so, in bays, creeks and tidal ponds strung along the Atlantic seaboard from Virginia to Prince Edward Island, Bloomberg Pursuits magazine will report in its Holiday 2013 issue.
Each oyster variety has its own distinctive look and flavour and its own fanciful name, including Walrus & Carpenter, Matunuck and, Quartuccio’s bestseller, Naked Cowboy, a favourite at the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York.
A century and a half ago, oysters and oyster canneries were a major industry. Oysters fed Native Americans and sustained early European settlers; 19th-century Americans consumed oysters more often than beef. Oyster beds were the coral reefs of the Northeastern U.S., keeping water free of silt and sustaining rich fishing grounds. By the late 1800s, overharvesting had destroyed many of the most productive beds, and by the 1960s, pollution and farm runoff had killed much of the rest. The 1972 Clean Water Act offered oysters a mulligan, and in the past decade, a locavore oyster revolution has taken off.
“People love tasting variety, and oysters have it even more than wine,” says Rowan Jacobsen, author of A Geography of Oysters, a guide to the U.S. locavore oyster scene. “They’re a concentrated form of the water in which they grow.”
Algae, minerals and even the salinity and temperature of the water contribute to what connoisseurs call a bivalve’s meroir, a maritime play on the wine world’s terroir.
“Each has its own individual taste, based on three characteristics: species, the water they’re raised in and the farming method,” says Rick Moonen, a Las Vegas chef and leader of the sustainable seafood movement. What’s more, oysters are “fantastic little vacuum cleaners,” Moonen says. “The more we produce, the cleaner our environment becomes.”
A sampling of oysters from the East Coast attests to the palate’s astonishing ability to distinguish subtle differences in salinity, vegetable tastes (hints of cucumber, kelp, spinach) and consistency — from the fleshy, watery oysters of Florida and the Chesapeake Bay to the concentrated salts and tangy mineral notes of those from the chilly waters of Maine and Prince Edward Island.
Today, oyster farming is a $40 million-a-year industry on the East Coast and in the Pacific Northwest. It’s even larger in Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, where commercial shuckeries pack the larger, blander Southern oysters into buckets and sell them by the pound for frying and stews, says Bob Rheault, who runs the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association.
While small-scale oystering supports several thousand jobs, and the mollusks have helped revitalize coastal ecosystems, the real boon has been to consumers, who can now choose from among many dozens of varieties at restaurants across the country.