“The fact that oyster farmers are suffering so much has to do with the restaurant business,” Blue Hill at Stone Barns Chef Dan Barber said.
Farmers have mastered the timing of when to pull their oysters so they’re the right size and are able to grow the shells in the shape consumers prefer. But delivering the petite oysters diners want means they generally have to be harvested anywhere between eight months to two years in the U.S., depending on where they’re grown. If farmers leave their oysters in the water during the pandemic, they’ll get much bigger than consumers are generally willing to buy or consume.
“The fact that oyster farmers are suffering so much has to do with the restaurant business,” Barber said, citing “a culture that shifted away from oysters as a bedrock to the diet, and went to cocktail oysters.”Isabel Osinski said big oysters are a sustainable source of protein that can be included in pasta, soup or even eaten for breakfast with eggs.
The infrastructure and the demand simply don’t exist to fulfill the Osinskis’ dream of people eating larger oysters, like they might steak or salmon, and there’s scant money to build it, unlike 150 years ago, when that infrastructure was robust. But overharvesting during the 19th and 20th century flattened the reefs, Keiner said, and despite oysters’ ability to clean the waters they inhabit, widespread pollution killed off much of the wild oyster population. In addition, a few typhoid deaths from oyster consumption caused panic, and people started to turn to other forms of protein that were becoming more affordable.
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