Up until this point, for centuries in fact, an oyster had been a difficult thing to love. It was a food for the brave, one who dared to venture into the tangled, oddly textured, vaguely sexual, bottom-feeding realm of mollusks. They had good months and bad months. They could make us sick. If we chanced upon a superlative one, they could also delight us, like a carnival game. That was their appeal. Indeed, Americans couldn’t get enough: We dredged up our bays and spoiled our rivers until there was almost nothing wild left. There was little choice but to cultivate them. Along the way, a few farmers thought to make improvements. Didn’t we want the shells to be more shapely, round and deep? Wouldn’t it be nice if the meat were a little less sinuous and more consistent? Couldn’t they be a little easier to shuck? In answering these questions, we prevented domestic oysters from disappearing — but we also homogenized them, making something safe and predictable out of what was once wild.
TO RAISE AN OYSTER, you merely need to spread spat (baby oysters, essentially) in water with a suitable bottom and wait. Oysters do not need to be fed or herded. They just grow, feasting on phytoplankton until someone decides to take them back out.
In the 2,000 years since the Romans started farming them, though, the process has become increasingly complicated. In the 1920s, producers in Japan started hanging oysters from strings to protect them from sea-floor-dwelling predators. In the early 1980s, West Coast hatcheries started selling oyster larvae attached to crushed bits of shell that could be grown individually, rather than in clumps that required hammering the shells apart. In 1986, an Australian patented a cylinder that floats in open water, using the tidal forces to knock those individual oysters against one another like rocks being polished in a tumbler. This technique — which breaks off the animal’s long, brittle bill in favor of a deeper, shorter, stronger cup — combined with those previous innovations, ushered in the perfect oyster of our current era. According to Mike Lata, the chef and co-owner of the Ordinary restaurant in Charleston, S.C., the oyster has become “the only feel-good story in our food chain right now” — an easy-to-raise, in-demand delicacy that cleans the environment as it grows: As a filter-feeder, it removes impurities from the water, which increases local biodiversity.
Like a grape, the flavor of an oyster is sensitive to minute variations in place and climate. An oyster makes itself from whatever is in the water around it: the vegetal notes of certain algae, the salty bite of open ocean water, the muddy depth of a riverbed. There are only a handful of species in the world; from them, farmers have engineered the hundreds of brand names served at restaurants today. In recent decades, no single oyster has had better name recognition than the Kumamoto, a small, slow-growing species introduced to the West Coast from Japan. Taylor Shellfish, a 128-year-old family company in Washington (the largest shellfish producer in the country), created a brand out of them by marketing to celebrated seafood chefs. Customers loved the dainty, polite shape. After selling three and a half million of them in 2008, the Taylor family wanted to improve on that success. They floated mesh bags over open waters in Willapa Bay, north of Portland, Ore., where raising Kumamotos had proved impossible, and loaded them with Crassostrea gigas, a less finicky species. The waves rocked the oysters against one another inside the sacks until they had created something equally deep-cupped but faster-growing and meatier. The Taylors named it Shigoku, which translates from Japanese to something like “ultimate.” By the end of 2018, they expect to sell nearly six million of these.
