Review: October 2009

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From where I sit reading The Living Shore, it looks as if Rowan Jacobsen has the ideal job. He’s already won one of the James Beard Foundation Awards—the so-called Oscars of the food world—for his 2007 book A Geography of Oysters, which no doubt involved considerable gustatory research on the mouthwatering mollusks. Then in 2008 he signed on as the literary chronicler of a nine-member expedition to the pristine coast of British Columbia. Their mission: find a thriving bed of Olympia oysters (Ostrea conchaphila), known locally as Olys, as part of an effort to restore the native ecosystem of Puget Sound, including a sustainable shellfish industry. What a job for a nature/food writer! Fresh air, beautiful scenery, and all the seafood you can eat.

Olys, smaller cousins of the oysters I enjoy each year on Cape Cod, were once abundant all along the Pacific coast from Panama to Sitka, Alaska. They were a staple food for natives, who left behind shell middens occasionally as big as high school football fields. (Appropriately, Jacobsen calls oysters “the ham sandwich of 1000 b.c.”) The hordes of prospectors who flocked to California in the mid-1800s feasted on Olys, too, and enterprising oystermen found the shellfish beds a surer way to riches than the goldfields. But overharvesting wiped out one rich shellfishery after another. The coup de grâce for the Oly came in the late 1920s, when industrial pollution and cold weather decimated the last remaining native oyster communities of Puget Sound and British Columbia. Larger and hardier breeds of oyster have been introduced successfully to North America’s Pacific coast, but only a few scattered colonies of the Olympia oyster remain. A shame, writes Jacobsen, because their “coppery, smoked-mushroom sweetness is unlike anything else in the world.”

It’s not giving away any punch lines to reveal that Jacobsen’s expedition found a remote estuary off the coast of Vancouver Island that is literally paved with Olympia oysters, and that the resulting ecological data may provide the key to a resurgence of the species in bays and raw bars along the Northwest coast.

But Jacobsen’s experience also provided him with food for thought. Just as agriculture led to the spread of civilization in the Old World, he believes, aquaculture may have spread civilization in the New World. Recent archaeological work in British Columbia suggests that the first humans to cross the Bering land bridge during the last ice age thrived on shellfish. Their high nutritional content may also have aided in developing the prodigious brains of Homo sapiens during a far earlier ice age, along the coasts of southern Africa.

Jacobsen is doubtless right that shellfish played an important role in the diet and culture of the past. And he’s equally persuasive in urging the preservation and protection of native shellfish habitats. (As a spur to action, he provides a substantial appendix listing organizations devoted to this task.) So if he sometimes seems to be taking things to extremes, regarding humans as creatures created for the shore and by the shore, you may be inclined to indulge him. After all, the oyster is his world—and the world, it seems to me, is his oyster.