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But the most remarkable thing about Apalachicola oysters is that they are still harvested by tongs, the way oysters were harvested a hundred years ago. In between eating oysters and crabs, SFA members took turns taking boat rides out to meet the oyster tongers at work on the bay and trying their hand at tonging.
"We're glad our children didn't follow in our footsteps," Mary Green said as she culled oysters her husband, Tom Green, brought to the surface. "This is a hard way to make a living." The Greens have been tonging for decades. Tom walked the deck of their small boat with the tongs in the water, while Mary sat and sorted the keepers from the muddy debris.
Tom dunked the 14-foot joined rakes into the water and snipped at the oysters below, then slowly raised a load to the surface. It's a lot slower than dredging oysters from an oyster lug with a diesel winch the way they do it in Texas and Louisiana, but tongers do less damage to the oyster reefs. Tom shucked an oyster and handed it to me. It was very soft and creamy, with hardly any salinity. It tasted as warm as the water.
Oyster tonging is a disappearing way of life. Ask me to choose between dripping-wet Pacific oysters from the state-of-the-art Hog Island Oyster Company on gorgeous Tomales Bay and creamy, freshly shucked Virginicas in Apalachicola, a place where an older American food culture is still struggling to survive, and I'd have to go with "all of the above."
In the past few years, the oyster wars have gotten out of hand. In 2003, after several deaths were blamed on Gulf oysters in California, that state passed a law making it illegal to buy, sell, or transport Gulf oysters in California during the summer months. And Texas, in turn, cracked down on exotic species regulations to make it illegal for Texas oyster bars to sell the Pacific oysters and Kumamotos that are grown on the West Coast.
Both states claim to be motivated by high ideals, and each has been accused of protectionism on behalf of their local oyster industries.
In the summer, Gulf oysters have high levels of Vibrio vulnificus, a naturally occurring bacteria that was first identified in the 1970s and is now blamed for causing illnesses and deaths. A few big Gulf oyster companies that harvest on private leases have fought a ban on summer sales, arguing that Vibrio is harmless to the vast majority of the population.
It's a stupid argument. The public oyster season in the Gulf states has always been closed during the summer anyway. Regular oyster fishermen and tongers like Tom and Mary Green aren't doing any fishing. But the problem will soon be solved, thanks to global warming.
Oyster-borne Vibrio bacterias are now causing illnesses and closing oyster beds in the summer months as far north as Washington state and Alaska. That's why regulatory agencies are considering banning the summer sale of oysters in all parts of the country. "Don't eat oysters in a month without an 'R' in it" is not an outdated adage after all. But there are other good reasons to avoid oysters in the summer besides the health risks.
Americans seem to have lost touch with the fact that oysters are a seasonal food. In France, the largest oyster-producing country in the Western world, 80 percent of the entire oyster harvest is consumed in one week between Christmas and New Year's.
The best reason not to eat oysters in the summer is that they don't taste very good — unless you import them from the Southern Hemisphere.
The Clean Water Act of 1972 got the "Great American Oyster Renaissance" started. Once we cleaned up our rivers and streams, salt marshes and estuaries that had been stagnant and clogged with algae cleared up. Crabs and fish began to appear where they hadn't been seen in decades. Natural oyster reefs came back, and tidelands where oysters had once been cultivated were viable again.
There have been problems along the way. And now the oyster industry is responding to a new set of challenges. Texas Parks and Wildlife's Coastal Region 1 director Lance Robinson says the state will spend some $2 million to restore oyster reefs in Galveston Bay damaged by Hurricane Ike. About half the money will be used to dredge up oyster shells from under the debris to provide hard surfaces for oyster spats (larvae) to adhere to. The other half will go toward creating artificial reefs by dropping concrete chunks and other hard materials to form new substrate. But the reefs will be closed for several years after the restoration project to give the new oysters a chance to grow.
In the short term, there will be fewer oysters. But hurricanes have been pounding the Gulf Coast since the beginning of time. Oysters are resilient. Whenever they sense changes in water temperature or salinity, they go into a reproductive orgy, ensuring their survival by spawning enormous clouds of offspring. Hopeful oyster industry experts say there is every reason to expect that, two years from now, the Texas oyster harvest will be bigger than ever. Louisiana, the nation's largest oyster-producing state, could return to full production in two years as well.
Meanwhile, some other oyster areas are taking up the slack. Bright spots include New Jersey, Florida, and Mississippi, all of which have dramatically increased their production in the last three years.
But the problems with oyster larvae in Washington State hatcheries are a much more frightening situation. The failure was originally attributed to an oyster pathogen called Vibrio tubiashii. Last summer, newspaper stories reported that a $200,000 filtering system installed on one large hatchery would restore production to normal. But according to Bill Taylor of Taylor Shellfish, the oyster larvae are still dying despite the fact that Vibrio tubiashii is no longer present.
