The Big Oyster (31 page)

Old practices were becoming newly
controversial, including the New York custom of “drinking” oysters. After oysters were harvested, rather than taking them directly to market, the oystermen would “float” them in holding tanks in the mouths of freshwater rivers and streams. This made the oysters whiter in color and plumper in appearance, although this plumpness was a bloating that may have made the oysters less flavorful. An article in
The New York Times
in 1910 called drinking “adulteration.” It argued, “Adulteration of oysters on the half shell, freshly opened, might be thought as difficult as adulteration of unpeeled fruit.” The
Times
reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had been looking into the question because oysters were classified and priced by their size, and an oyster could become bloated into a different price category. The Department of Agriculture argued that four quarts of shucked oysters placed in one quart of water would quickly become five quarts of oysters if the oysters had been drinking fresh water prior to shucking. The consumer would not know that one of those quarts was water.

Surprisingly few consumers, most of them European, complained that the practice also watered down the flavor. But there was another growing issue. The freshwater sources of the New York estuary system where the oysters were drinking were the most polluted waters. Industry dumped waste into rivers. Already by the eighteenth century, Gowanus Bay, where the Dutch had praised foot-long oysters, had been closed to oystering because of raw sewage. By the midnineteenth century, Jamaica Bay's famous Rockaway beds were closed because of the tons of raw sewage dumped there from nearby Long Island towns. Such contaminated freshwater openings to the sea were exactly where oystermen chose to have their catches drink.

Sewage along with other New York garbage and waste was taken out to sea on scows and dumped. Some of it washed back into the city, even clogging parts of the harbor, and as early as the 1854 oyster panic, many people were denouncing this practice, especially when the waste, including dead animals, washed up in the popular beach resorts in the summertime. A growing belief that the foul smells were poisonous disease-causing gas led to the formation of the Metropolitan Board of Health in 1866. In 1870, this was taken over by the New York City Board of Health, which in 1886 built the first chemically treated waste-water facility in the United States on Coney Island. But by 1910, 600 million gallons of untreated sewage were dumped into New York City water every day. When at the beginning of the twentieth century, floating bathhouses opened on the shores of Manhattan every summer for swimming and recreation, sewage could be seen among the swimmers and sometimes children would emerge covered in filth.

Cholera is a disease
caused by bacteria,
Vibrio cholerae.
Although bacteria, the oldest form of life on earth, was first discovered in the seventeenth century, it was not until the late nineteenth century that its role in diseases was understood. Only a few years after the oyster panic, the French chemist Louis Pasteur promoted his theory that diseases were caused by germs. But it was only a theory—referred to as “the germ theory”—until the German bacteriologist Robert Koch started proving the connection. In 1884, after documenting the infection process of numerous other diseases, he demonstrated how
Vibrio cholerae
caused cholera. In 1885, cholera bacteria were recovered from harbor water during an epidemic in Marseille. The long-suspected connection between oysters and typhoid became clearly established in the 1890s. It was also determined that sewage bred the
Salmonella bacillus,
which public-health authorities could identify in the water and in oysters and which was the cause of persistent outbreaks of typhoid.

In one decade, the medical view of the world changed. The culprits of urban epidemics switched from poverty, immigration, and immorality to bacteria, sewage, and shellfish. The “germ theory” that had been debated and often rejected in medical schools up until the 1880s became, by 1890, the established scientific thinking.

Though typhoid did not have nearly the mortality rate of cholera, it was a prolonged ailment that sometimes resulted in death. It swept rapidly through urban areas because infected people, especially if involved in handling food, could pass it on. The most famous example was Mary Mallon, Typhoid Mary, who became infected in 1904 while working as a cook in a typhoid-stricken household in Oyster Bay, Long Island. She continued as a cook in numerous households and was apprehended in 1907 while cooking for a Park Avenue home. So began a history of being institutionalized, released, caught cooking, and once again apprehended. She was thought to have been responsible for at least fifty cases of typhoid, three fatal, including a serious outbreak at a women's hospital.

Public-health officials began to understand that oysters, because they feed by filtering water, are a reflection of the quality of the water in which they live. They can be used to measure pollutants such as DDT and have even been used to measure radiation. At the turn of the century, oysters showed that New York was producing too much sewage to be able to dump it all into the sea without consequences.

London, whose valuable oyster beds were in the estuary of the Thames, had the same problem. In 1896, a British medical inspector, Dr. H. Timbrell Bulstrode, toured the principal oyster beds of England and Wales and reported in detail on the relationship of sewage drains to oyster beds. Scares in prominent oyster beds, such as Whitstable in 1903, seriously diminished the demand for oysters in Britain. France also had scares about infected oysters, and between 1898 and 1901, the demand for oysters in France was cut in half. But while British demand continued to decline, the French, always the more courageous eaters, soon resumed their old ways.

In New York, once the typhoid scares began, the practice of drinking oysters was banned by the Pure Food Department in Washington. But the large New Jersey oyster packers fought the decision. The 1905 Christmas edition of the
Keyport Weekly,
a publication that was a great booster of the local oyster industry, argued:

The oysterman contended that the “floated” oysters were better, kept longer and were more tender than those not thus treated. The discussion led Professor Julius Nelson of Rutgers College, Biologist of the New Jersey State Agricultural Experiment Station and a scientist of the highest standing—himself at first opposed to the oystermen's contention—to investigate the problem . . . . He made an exhaustive study of the question, and the result was that for once that practical man knew more than the scientist and the oystermen's contention was upheld in every detail and the Pure Food Department has withdrawn the ban. The freshened oyster is better, cleaner, tenderer, purer, free from sand, etc. and the unfloated article has practically passed from the market. The only possible danger is from oysters floated in polluted waters, and as all such grounds are now under the supervision of both the State and local boards of health such a thing is well nigh an impossibility, especially with a reputable firm.

This was characteristic of the thinking of many people in 1905. They believed that now that the government had learned how to measure pollution, they didn't have to worry about it anymore. But what those health boards found was that there was almost no unpolluted fresh water available for floating oysters. And so the practice was once again banned, a development cheered by
The New York Times.
At the opening of the season in 1909, the paper reported that “the sickly bleached color is disappearing from oysters” because the practice of “drinking” had been, at last, stopped.

By 1880,
the oysters known as Yorks, from York Bay, the shallow water along northern New Jersey, were no longer available. The water of York Bay was so fouled with sewage and discharges from Jersey City factories that the oysters were safe to use only as seed. Most of the seed oysters planted in Raritan Bay were from Newark Bay, while oysters from the lower Passaic were shipped by the carload to the Pacific to be planted in California.

It began as an experiment in 1873 when Joseph Ellsworth, owner of one of the more prominent oyster firms, with a barge in Manhattan and an office at the Washington Market, sent a train boxcar full of Newark Bay seed oysters to San Francisco. The best and cleanest dime-size oysters were selected. These oysters needed to grow in the Pacific for only two years, in part because, as the Reverend Samuel Lockwood wrote in an 1874
Popular Science Monthly
article, Californians were “more easily suited on the question of size than the people East.”

Californians were accustomed to smaller oysters and New Yorkers theorized that cold Pacific waters stunted them early in their growth, but it might be that the
Crassostrea gigas
is a smaller oyster than its East Coast cousin, the
Crassostrea virginica.
The tendency was to blame it on the water. Lockwood said, “The native Californian oyster is a puny affair and it is to be feared that the Eastern oyster will degenerate in Pacific waters.” But Ellsworth hoped that the transplanted New Jersey product would thrive and grow rapidly off the California coast. It did and it also lost what a 1902 commission investigating New Jersey oysters called “the unpleasant flavor it derives early in life from the polluted Newark waters.” This was at a time when the Passaic River, once regarded as the best fishing river in New Jersey, was so foul that it emitted acrid fumes that blistered the paint off nearby houses. Riverside residents were abandoning their homes to escape the stench. In 1901, J. & J. W. Ellsworth, which had built a packing plant in Keyport two years earlier, shipped 110 carloads of Newark Bay seed across the country to planters in California. Nine days after being taken from Newark Bay, the oysters were settled in upper San Francisco Bay.

By 1900, the market-size oysters of the Passaic River and Newark Bay, whose fresh waters were used for drinking oysters, were too polluted to be eaten. The beds became important sources of seed oysters, especially for shipping to California, but also for replanting the Keyport beds. Polluted Newark Bay was regarded as among the most valuable seed source in New Jersey at a time when seed was starting to become difficult to find.

This transplanting of species that began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century quickly became commonplace. It became a contest, like those in nature, in which the hardiest triumphed and the hardiest were clearly the
Crassostrea.
Europeans replaced many struggling
Ostrea edulis
beds with the more durable Portuguese oyster, the
Crassostrea angulata,
and with the American
Crassostrea virginica. Ostreas
are found naturally on the Pacific coast of North America, such as the
Ostrea lurida,
the Olympia oyster. But West Coast beds were planted with the more temperature-resistant East Coast
Crassostrea virginica
and the more disease-resistant Asian
Crassostrea gigas,
the Japanese and Korean oyster. The highly adaptable
Crassostrea gigas
has also been transplanted in Taiwan and China and has been introduced to New Zealand, Tasmania, Chile, the west coast of Canada, France, and Britain. The Chinese produce huge quantities of
Crassostrea plicatula,
which some biologists think is a misnomer and that the oyster is of a separate genus they have called
Alectryonella.

Saccostrea,
the Sydney rock oyster, is Australian and thrives in warm water.
Crassostrea rhizophorae,
the mangrove oyster, is common in the Caribbean and Central America, including Venezuela and Colombia, though the oyster industry remains small in these countries. There are also different
Crassostrea
species in Brazil, Sierra Leone and Senegal, the Philippines, and Thailand. There are also unique oysters such as
Tiostrea lutarea,
the New Zealand bluff oyster.

What all of this means is that while a certain diversity of genera is maintained, most of the oysters eaten in the world today are
Crassostrea.
No one is particularly upset about this, although there is justifiable mourning for the passing of the European
Ostrea,
not just because Europeans like to obsess about foreign takeovers but because most of Europe's greatest and most famous oysters, like the French belon and the British Colchester, are
Ostrea edulis,
a species that produces a meaty creature with an incomparable fresh, briny flavor.