Sex, Death and Oysters by Robb Walsh

Author:Robb Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781582436500
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

The mystery of why oysters disappeared from England was addressed a few years ago by a retired Cambridge economics professor named Robert Neild. Intrigued by the abundance of oysters in France and their scarcity in the United Kingdom, Neild submerged himself in the sort of statistical research that economists love and food writers loathe.

The result was a wonderful book called The English, the French and the Oyster that was published in 1995. In the book, Neild follows the government responses in both countries to the crisis in the oyster industry that occurred around 1850. Oysters were dying off in both places, but the two governments took a radically different approach to the problem.

An English commission created to study the failure of the oyster harvest concluded that there was a bad spat set and no evidence of overfishing. Their recommendation was to suspend all local and national government regulations that might limit oystering, so that individuals would have economic incentives to restock the oyster beds. The fishery recovered for a while and then failed.

Across the English Channel, facing the same dilemma in the mid- 1800s, Napoleon III slapped a ban on fishing until the oyster population could recover, strictly regulated the season afterward, directed government development of oyster parks in the intertidal areas for use by oystermen big and small, and had scientists begin research that would lead to a national system of oyster farming.

In 1902, when people started falling sick and dying because English oysters were contaminated with sewage, the British government responded to the public outcry with investigations and reports, but little in the way of real action. The result was a steady decline in oyster sales. The oyster, which was considered the most common food of the poor in the time of Dickens, completely disappeared from English food culture. As I discovered in Colchester, most English people don’t even consider oysters edible anymore.

In 1915, the French created sanitary commissions that inspected oysters and oyster beds to prevent unhealthy oysters from getting onto the market. In 1930, the first steps were taken to stop pollution that might affect oyster beds. A comprehensive national system to ensure the purity of French oysters was established in 1939 and became the model for the E.U. regulations that were enacted in 1993. Today French people of all economic classes enjoy oysters—most often in their homes.

The English laissez-faire economic system, which relied on market forces and individual initiative, functioned beautifully during the Industrial Revolution. The French mercantile economic system, in which government intervened on behalf of key industries, was arguably less successful in the nineteenth century. But in the particular case of oysters, a resource which requires some management, government regulation proved good for business.

In the mid-1800s, England and France both produced around 500 million oysters a year. Today England produces around 10 million oysters a year and France produces 2 billion oysters a year. History has proven that the French approach was the right one.

“But the main point that stands out in a

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