November 20, 2013 — 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 Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Bloomberg Pursuits magazine will report in its Holiday 2013 issue.
“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 seafloor, 50 miles 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 Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Bloomberg Pursuits magazine will report in its Holiday 2013 issue.
Each oyster variety has its own distinctive look and flavor and its own fanciful name, including Walrus & Carpenter, Matunuck and, Quartuccio’s best-seller, Naked Cowboy, a favorite 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.”
Bivalve Meroir
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.”