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Oysters at Thanksgiving

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 22, 2022| 15 Comments »

Emily’s Oysters in Maine, Sun Farm Oysters in Rhode Island, and Cuttyhunk Shellfish Farms in Massachusetts are a few of the hardy crews eager to supply oysters for your Thanksgiving stuffing.

One of Suzanne’s oldest friends runs an oyster business on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, and Thanksgiving is a big time for her. That’s because, in New England at least, many people see oysters as traditional for Thanksgiving.

The radio show Living on Earth recently did a show on the topic.

“STEVE CURWOOD: In the 19th century, oysters were a popular food item in the US, especially with the advent of commercial food canning, and by 1900, Americans were gobbling down some 160 million pounds of oysters a year. But overconsumption, sanitation concerns about raw oysters and the huge expansion of the beef and pork business that the railroads made possible, led to the oyster’s decline.

“Farmed correctly, oysters can be sustainable and their reefs protect coastal areas, so in recent years the popularity of local foods has spawned new oyster farmers — farmers that were hit hard this year with a drop in demand during the Covid crisis. Not everybody loves them of course, but oysters can be eaten in many ways beyond the half-shell. Celebrity chef Barton Seaver joins us from his kitchen near the harbor of South Freeport, Maine, to show how oysters can even lend flavor to Thanksgiving stuffing. … So tell me, why have the oyster farmers and fishermen been hit so hard by COVID-19?

“BARTON SEAVER: Oysters are, well, they’re so important to the restaurant industry. And that’s where so many of us go to get them. By some anecdotal accounts, in March, April, May, large oyster dealers around the country I’ve talked to lost 98% of their business, who were selling into restaurants; some of that has come back. Massachusetts has some hard data, around about 60 to 70% of their oysters landed, that business was lost. …

“CURWOOD: Where I live in southern New Hampshire near the Great Bay … I noticed that there were folks who actually had set up stands along the side of the road to sell oysters individually to people.

“SEAVER: Yeah! Well, that’s been one of the great success stories. And that’s sort of the inherent nature of oyster farming is that these are small businessmen and -women who are running a farm, and they are entrepreneurs, and they were able to pivot quite quickly. And as, in COVID, we turned our attentions anew to local food systems, oysters are a prominent part of that for those of us on the coasts. There is no food that is of place as much as are oysters, clams, mussels. …

“CURWOOD: Now, we know from history that Native Americans brought shellfish to the pilgrims that came here to the New England area in the 1600s. To what extent do you think oysters and shellfish should regain a place at the Thanksgiving table?

“SEAVER: Well, oysters were one of the foundational foods of this country and long before the white man set foot on this continent, oysters were serving and sustaining native populations for aeons. … But through decimation of local oyster populations in the wild, throughout the United States and our coastlines, we lost access to oysters. …

“CURWOOD: Tell me why you think they’re so important ecologically.

“SEAVER: Oysters, amongst other shellfish, are you know, what was known as a keystone species. They’re fundamental to the health of the ecosystems in which they are prevalent. They provide water quality, they provide habitat for countless other species. They are the bedrock upon which ecosystems’ health and resiliency relies. And in the absence of wild oysters, because we’ve decimated them through overfishing, through disease, etc., habitat loss, oyster farming has stepped into the role of providing those ecosystem services, those vital services.

Every oyster you eat encourages an oyster farmer, a small businessman or -woman, to plant many more, to augment and expand upon those ecosystem services provided by them.

“And in that way, I think it’s our patriotic duty to eat as many farm-raised shellfish as we can.

“CURWOOD: Yeah, in fact, you know, as the storms pick up with climate disruption, oyster reefs are a great way to slow down the storm surge, huh?

“SEAVER: Absolutely. We’ve seen this with Katrina, we saw this with Superstorm Sandy, that these vulnerable civic centers are made more vulnerable by the lack of those natural oyster reefs that naturally stopped those storm surges. …

“CURWOOD: There’s a project going on that the Nature Conservancy is a big part of. They’re [buying up] oysters that are otherwise going unsold to the restaurants during this pandemic, to help farmers who need to have a source of cash, and they’re using those oysters to restore more shellfish reefs. Why is it important to have oysters in local communities? …

“SEAVER: [Sustainable small business.] In my village, there’s a young woman named Emily — ‘Emily’s Oysters.’ She grew up here, and she went to school out in Puget Sound, and she was looking for something to do. [You know there’s a] brain drain in small, rural communities. But oyster farming caught her heart … and now she’s farming 50, 60, 70,000 oysters out in the waters that I can see from my house, pretty much. And she’s selling at local farmers’ markets. [To me, that’s] the quintessential story of success and of human sustainability acting in concert with our ecosystems. …

“CURWOOD: You have some delicious recipes, Barton, on your website. There’s — oh, the oyster risotto, the broiled oysters Rockefeller. And I believe you’re going to show us how to make an oyster stuffing, being that we’re close to Thanksgiving, huh? Now, I must say I never knew the stuffing on my Thanksgiving table could feature shellfish.”

More at Living on Earth, here, where you also can get the recipe for stuffing. Barton Seaver’s book is The Joy of Seafood: The All-Purpose Seafood Cookbook, with almost 1000 recipes.

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Hurricane Changes Attitudes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on November 11, 2022| 4 Comments »

Photo: Moira Donovan.
“Hurricane Fiona carved out sections of coastline,” says the Monitor, “and caused dunes to disappear on Prince Edward Island, where beaches like this one remained closed weeks later.”

There’s nothing like a new experience to make you see things differently. At the Christian Science Monitor, Moira Donovan reports that the severity of a recent hurricane on Canada’s Prince Edward Island is forcing people “to grapple with how climate change is rewriting people’s relationship with the sea.”

She writes, “Robbie Moore spent a week preparing his oyster farm as Hurricane Fiona barreled toward Prince Edward Island in late September. But that didn’t spare it from the impact.

“On Sept. 24, Fiona roared across Atlantic Canada, leaving catastrophe in its wake, including two deaths. Prince Edward Island recorded 92 mph winds, and on the North Shore, where Mr. Moore’s farm is located, the storm ripped up trees, reduced wharves to splinters, and flooded structures. By the time he could get to his farm to assess the damage several days later, he found some sections had vanished, and this year’s oyster crop had been tossed into the treeline, 30 feet from the high-water mark.

“Still, he counts himself relatively fortunate. Some people lost everything, and as much as people had prepared, there was no way to prepare for the damage Fiona caused. ‘There’s a lot of people very discouraged right now,’ he says.

“The recovery is expected to take years. But given what Fiona has shown about the growing threat posed by hurricanes, the more transformative effect could be still to come. As hurricanes become a more regular, immediate danger up and down North America’s Eastern Seaboard, Atlantic Canada – like regions from the Gulf Coast to Florida to New England – is beginning to grapple with how climate change is rewriting people’s relationship with the sea.

“While Atlantic Canada is no stranger to volatile weather, Fiona marked a departure.

Past storms, such as Hurricane Dorian in 2019, had weakened before they made landfall. But Fiona retained much of its strength, making it the most powerful storm to ever hit Canada.

“University of Prince Edward Island climatologist Adam Fenech says that while Fiona was unprecedented, the storm was not unanticipated, given projections of stronger storms in the Atlantic hurricane season. ‘All the things that we’ve been talking about for 30 years are all coming true,’ he says.

“Despite that consensus, Dr. Fenech has spent years playing Cassandra to an at-times skeptical public. Half a dozen years ago, when Dr. Fenech was invited to give a talk about coastal erosion at a cottage development on Prince Edward Island’s North Shore, he warned that many of the properties could disappear in a big storm. Residents were unconvinced. …

“When Fiona hit, 12 cottages in that development were swept off their footings; several were swallowed wholesale by the ocean. In other places, people’s year-round homes were destroyed.

“But in a region where communities have deep ties to the coast, housing isn’t the only concern. Atlantic Canada is the site of Canada’s most lucrative fisheries, operating out of nearly 200 small harbors dotting the coastline – nearly three-quarters of which were affected by Fiona in some way.

“For many harbors, the destruction caused by Fiona will mean an expensive rebuild. But some people are saying the reconstruction should look different.

“When Fiona hit Newfoundland’s southwest coast, Shawn Bath was a day’s drive away; as the scale of the damage came to light, he loaded his truck, hitched his boat, and headed across the province.

“There, he found … shorelines littered with debris. In many places, wharves and fishing stages had been smashed like toothpicks, scattering fishing gear into the water. Mr. Bath and his crew – who run a marine debris cleanup project called the Clean Harbours Initiative – made their way to a small community called Burnt Islands, and got to work. …

” ‘It’s overwhelming,’ says Mr. Bath. ‘Pictures don’t do it justice.’ And he’s worried that there are more than a thousand fishing nets drifting along the bottom of affected harbors. … In the long term, Mr. Bath says the way harbors are laid out needs to be rethought. Fishing infrastructure has traditionally been placed close to the water because that’s where it made the most sense to be. But that calculus has changed.

“ ‘There’s no point in rebuilding and filling all these stages with nets again, if two years down the road the same thing happens,’ he says. ‘Keeping fishing gear on the water’s edge is no longer a reasonable thing to do.’ …

“For Prince Edward Island musician Tara MacLean, who grew up playing in the dunes, the shock of seeing a beloved landscape suddenly vanish was indescribable. …

“Ms. MacLean says the sorrow for what’s been lost should serve as a wake-up call on the risk that climate change poses to the region. But it’s that emotional connection to the water that could also make changing the relationship to it difficult, and when things return to normal, the allure of living close to the water may return, too.”

More at the Monitor, here. No firewall.

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Let an Oyster Do It

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 26, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Katherine Rapin.
Camden Mayor Vic Carstarphen hands a flat of wild celery to an EPA diver for transplant. Local grasses and oysters are bringing hope to rivers.

We can rescue our environment if we try. Even the infamous city Camden is getting into the act.

Katherine Rapin writes at YaleEnvironment360, “On a recent summer morning near Camden, New Jersey, two divers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency hovered over a patch of sediment 10 feet below the surface of the Delaware River. With less than two feet of visibility in the churning estuary, they were transplanting a species crucial to the ecosystem: Vallisneria americana, or wild celery grass. One diver held a GoPro camera and a flashlight, capturing a shaky clip of the thin, ribbon-like blades bending with the current.

“Watching the divers’ bubbles surface from the EPA’s boat was Anthony Lara, experiential programs supervisor at the Center for Aquatic Sciences at Adventure Aquarium in Camden, who had nurtured these plants for months in tanks, from winter buds to mature grasses some 24 inches long. …

“This was the first planting of a new restoration project led by Upstream Alliance, a nonprofit focused on public access, clean water, and coastal resilience in the Delaware, Hudson, and Chesapeake watersheds. In collaboration with the Center for Aquatic Sciences, and with support from the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic team and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the alliance is working to repopulate areas of the estuary with wild celery grass, a plant vital to freshwater ecosystems. It’s among the new, natural restoration projects focused on bolstering plants and wildlife to improve water quality in the Delaware River, which provides drinking water for some 15 million people.

“Such initiatives are taking place across the United States, where, 50 years after passage of the Clean Water Act, urban waterways are continuing their comeback, showing increasing signs of life. And yet ecosystems still struggle, and waters are often inaccessible to the communities that live around them. Increasingly, scientists, nonprofits, academic institutions, and state agencies are focusing on organisms like bivalves (such as oysters and mussels) and aquatic plants to help nature restore fragile ecosystems, improve water quality, and increase resilience.

Bivalves and aquatic vegetation improve water clarity by grounding suspended particles, allowing more light to penetrate deeper

“They also have exceptional capacity to cycle nutrients — both by absorbing them as food and by making them more available to other organisms. Thriving underwater plant meadows act as carbon sinks and provide food and habitat for scores of small fish, crabs, and other bottom-dwellers. Healthy bivalve beds create structure that acts as a foundation for benthic habitat and holds sediment in place.

“ ‘Why not take the functional advantage of plants and animals that are naturally resilient and rebuild them?’ says Danielle Kreeger, science director at the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, which is spearheading a freshwater mussel hatchery in southwest Philadelphia. …

“One hundred miles north of Philadelphia, the Billion Oyster Project has been restoring the bivalves in New York Harbor since 2010, engaging more than 10,000 volunteers and 6,000 students in the project. [See my post on that here and search on ‘oyster’ for related posts.] Oyster nurseries are being installed in Belfast Lough in Northern Ireland, where until recently they were believed to have been extinct for a century. And a hatchery 30 miles west of Chicago has dispersed 25,000 mussels into area waterways, boosting the populations of common freshwater mussel species.

“Underwater vegetation restoration projects have been underway in the Chesapeake Bay and Tampa Bay for years, and more recently in California where seagrass species are in sharp decline. (Morro Bay, for example, has lost more than 90 percent of its eelgrass beds in the last 15 years.) The California Ocean Protection Council’s 2020 Strategic Plan to Protect California’s Coast and Ocean aims to preserve the mere 15,000 acres of known seagrass beds and cultivate 1,000 more acres by 2025.

“Scientists stress that these projects must be implemented alongside strategies to continue curbing contaminants, mainly excess nutrients from sewage and fertilizers, flowing into our waterways — still the most critical step in improving water quality. After several decades of aquatic vegetation plantings in the Chesapeake Bay, for example, scientists say that the modest increase of plants is largely due to nature restoring itself following a reduction in nutrient pollution.

“And any human intervention in a complex ecosystem raises a host of compelling concerns, such as how to ensure sufficient genetic diversity and monitor competition for food and resources. Scientists say that, in many cases, they’re learning as they go.

“Still, in areas where the natural environment is improving, bringing back bivalves and aquatic plants can create a lasting foundation for entire ecosystems. And restoration initiatives are an active form of stewardship that connects people to their waterways, helping them understand the ecosystems we depend on for our survival.”

More at YaleEnvironment360, here. No firewall.

It’s surprising what can happen when people who didn’t care in the past start to care.

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Recycling Oyster Shells

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 14, 2021| 5 Comments »

Photo: Kara Holsopple, The Allegheny Front.
Stephanie Alexander at the Horn Point Lab oyster hatchery. Lawn chemicals pollute Chesapeake Bay. Oysters fight back.

Today I want to expand on my 2019 blog post about New York City’s Billion Oyster Project, which uses restaurants’ discarded oyster shells to fight erosion in the harbor.

According to a July broadcast of Living on Earth [LOE], Pittsburgh restaurants are doing something similar. In this case, it’s to counteract pollution caused by fertilizer that runs into Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay.

LOE’S BOBBY “BASCOMB: The Chesapeake Bay is routinely inundated with fertilizer runoff from the surrounding watershed in parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland. The result is algae blooms that suck up oxygen in the water and create dead zones for most other forms of life in the Bay. Oysters are particularly vulnerable, but as Kara Holsopple of the Allegheny Front reports, some local groups have come up with a novel way to help oysters recover.

“KARA HOLSOPPLE: Jessica Lewis says shucking an oyster is like picking a lock.

“JESSICA LEWIS: You press down and then you just wiggle, pop it open and, the abductor muscle right there. You clean that. …

“HOLSOPPLE: Lewis says they go through about three to four hundred oysters here a week from the East and West coasts. This oyster is from Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay — and its top and bottom shell are going back there… Lewis and her staff toss the spent shells in a 35 gallon barrel with a screw-on lid, located in the trash area on the ground floor of the building. …

“About once a month a truck picks up the old shells from this and six other participating restaurants in Pittsburgh, and drives them more than 250 miles to a staging area just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland. From there, the oyster shells from Pittsburgh and ones collected from Maryland, Virginia and the D.C. area are taken to a site at the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge, for processing.

“KARIS KING: So here you’re looking at about 7,000 tons of clean shell.

“HOLSOPPLE: Karis King is with Oyster Recovery Partnership, a nonprofit which works to increase oyster numbers in the Chesapeake Bay. We’re standing at the base of a mountain of gray shells. They’ve been dumped into a machine that’s like a modified potato hopper, which sorts the shells. … Smaller fragments of broken shell fall away as a conveyor belt deposits the half shells into wire cages or piles where they’re cured for a year. …

“KING: Even with all the shell that we do recycle, and that we also purchase from shucking houses, we still don’t have enough to do large scale restoration, at the rate that we could.

“HOLSOPPLE: That’s because of the scale of the problem. Stephanie Alexander manages the Horn Point Lab oyster hatchery. …

“ALEXANDER: We’ve pretty much wiped the oyster out to less than 1 percent of historic levels. So we started this restoration effort where we’re using a hatchery to produce spat on shell to put back into the bay so we can kind of help jump start Mother Nature.

“HOLSOPPLE: The concept is pretty simple: Scientists here at the lab produce baby oysters from adults harvested from the bay, nurture the microscopic larvae with a custom algae diet, then get them attach to the recycled, treated oyster shells. That’s the ‘spat on shell.’ In practice, it’s a lot harder than it sounds…

“Ben Malmgren is an intern here, a student from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

“BEN MALMGREN: Right now we’re placing the oysters out on the spawning table where we are going to simulate river conditions that are ideal for spawning.

“HOLSOPPLE: The saltiness and temperature of the water in the shallow black basins has to be just right. Malmgren places the oysters in a grid formation, so it’s easier to separate the males from the females…

“MALMGREN: Because if we just let them spawn out on the table all these eggs are gonna go down to the into the drain. So once we see a female and we’ll we’ll know she’s a female by she’ll clap her top and bottom shell together and we’ll see a plume of eggs come out. …

“HOLSOPPLE: Even in the lab, nature is in charge. Stephanie Alexander says it was a slow summer…a lot of rain meant the adult oysters have lived with lower salinity levels, and they’re stressed. Out in the bay, the water is warmer, meaning the spat on shell might have a harder time growing that second shell, and over the years, forming the clusters that create oyster reefs.

“STEPHANIE ALEXANDER: When one thing gets out of whack everything else is going to kind of follow. So we’re trying to get the oysters back into balance so then hopefully everything else will follow as well. …

“Oysters are the vacuum cleaners or the kidneys of the bay and they just suck the water in, they decide if it’s food or not food. But no matter what it is that will remove it from the water column and that’s how they vacuum the bay up and clean it.

“HOLSOPPLE: Because of this superpower, oyster aquaculture is a best management practice identified by the regional partnership that oversees cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay. Some of the spat raised at the Horn Point Lab will make its way to oyster farmers, and those are the oysters on a half shell that are served in restaurants. But the majority of the spat will help rebuild oyster reefs, creating habitat for fish, and restoring the ecosystem.”

More at Living on Earth, here.

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Oysters Helping New York Harbor

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 3, 2019| 6 Comments »

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Photos: Agata Poniatowski
Oyster shells from restaurants get taken to Governors Island in the heart of the New York Harbor to be used in fighting erosion. Billion Oyster Project has collected more than 1 million pounds of oyster shells so far. 

I go to poetry readings at the local library, and inevitably in the question period, someone in the audience asks the poet, “How do you get your ideas?” (This is a question poets expect, and they always have a ready answer. Watch for the deer-in-the-headlights look if you ask a question they don’t expect.)

But I’m not sure any of us really know where we get our ideas. There is something mysterious about the way individual brains connect connect things heard, seen, smelled, touched, tasted with their individual experiences.

Today’s story is about shoring up an eroding harbor with recycled oyster shells. The idea to use oysters this way comes from years of research and contributions from many people. But, according to the report at National Public Radio (NPR), an idea for extending the benefits came from kids. Read on.

Andrea Strong reports, “Across New York City, more than 70 restaurants are tossing their oyster shells not into the trash or composting pile, but into the city’s eroded harbor. It’s all part of Billion Oyster Project‘s restaurant shell-collection program. …

“The shells are trucked over to Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood and once a month are brought en masse to Governors Island in the heart of the New York Harbor, just yards away from both Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. There, rolling shell hills sparkle in the sun while ‘curing’ out in the elements for one year, a process that rids them of contaminants.

“The shells then get a final cleaning and are moved to Billion Oyster Project’s hatchery at the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, a public high school on Governors Island that offers technical and vocational training in the marine sciences. In an aquaculture classroom’s hatchery, student-grown oysters produce larvae in an artificially induced springtime environment.

“In one to two weeks, each larvae grows a ‘foot’ — a little limb covered in a kind of natural glue — and then is moved to a tank full of the ‘cured’ restaurant shells, which serve as anchors for all of those sticky feet. This phase is critical: If larvae can’t find a place to attach, they die. One reclaimed shell can house 10 to 20 new live oysters, depending on shell size. …

“If the water is warm enough, mature oysters are moved to a reef structure — a cage or shellfish bag — that provides a stable area for oysters to fuse together and create a healthy reef in the New York Harbor.

“Then, the oysters begin doing what oysters do — which, it turns out, is quite a lot. Oysters are natural water filters; each one cleans 30 to 50 gallons of water a day. They also provide food and shelter for all sorts of marine creatures, supporting biodiversity. …

“Oyster reefs can protect against a hurricane’s wave velocity, which can destroy a city’s infrastructure. The New York Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery has partnered with Billion Oyster Project to install oysters on its $74 million Living Breakwaters Project, which aims to reduce and reverse erosion and damage from storm waves, improve the ecosystem health of Raritan Bay and encourage environmentally conscious stewardship of nearshore waters. …

“Brian Owens, who goes through about 20,000 oysters a week at his restaurant, Crave Fishbar, … says the project is not just smart for sustainability; it’s also good for business. Recycling shells significantly reduces carting expenses, something all NYC restaurants must pay for by the bag. ‘Recycling them into the reef is a huge savings,’ he says.

“In addition to saving on garbage collection, restaurants may soon be eligible for a tax credit thanks to New York Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal. The credit is a much needed balm for restaurants that have been hit with escalating costs and increasing regulatory burdens over the past few years. …

“The idea came from neither restaurants nor Rosenthal, but from students at one of Billion Oyster Project’s partner schools, West End Secondary on the Upper West Side.

“Rosenthal championed their idea, building support for the bill and bringing the students to Albany to learn about lawmaking and to participate in a press conference.

“Education of the next generation of environmental stewards has been at the heart of Billion Oyster Project since its inception in 2008, when [Billion Oyster Project Executive Director Pete] Malinowski was teaching aquaculture at the Harbor School. …

“Fifteen years later … that classroom program has grown into Billion Oyster Project and now includes programming in more than 80 middle and high schools. That works out to about 1,215 high school students and more than 6,500 middle school students. …

” Through this work, students develop awareness and affinity for the resource and the confidence that comes from knowing their actions can make a difference. With young people who care, the harbor has a real fighting chance,’ ” says Malinowski.

More.

Sending 422 oyster reef structures into the Hudson River to protect and purify New York Harbor.

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Seaweed Farming

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 16, 2016| 4 Comments »

Photo: Bob Plain

I do love the inventiveness of entrepreneurs. A friend of Suzanne and Erik’s is an inventive entrepreneur — an oyster entrepreneur, to be specific. Since oysters are a seasonal crop, he looked for something that might become his winter crop.

Bob Plain’s Narragansett Bay Blog has the story on Jules Opton-Himmel, RI’s first kelp farmer.

“Kelp, you may or may not have heard, is the next super food. It’s nutritious, sustainable and ecologically beneficial,” writes Plain.

He continues with a quote from a recent New Yorker article by Dana Goodyear: ” ‘Seaweed, which requires neither fresh water nor fertilizer, is one of the world’s most sustainable and nutritious crops. It absorbs dissolved nitrogen, phosphorous, and carbon dioxide directly from the sea — its footprint is negative — and proliferates at a terrific rate.’ …

“Coincidentally – and quite auspiciously – just as the blockbuster New Yorker article hit the newsstands, Opton-Himmel was gearing up to introduce kelp farming to Rhode Island. …

“Farm-raised kelp is grown on a longline – a submersible thick rope, held in place by anchors and buoys, that is used to hold in place seafood harvesting equipment. A thin string of kelp spores is wrapped around the longline, and the kelp grows toward the bottom. Opton-Himmel, with the help of Scott Lindell and David Bailey from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass, planted 1,000 feet. …

“Unlike oysters, which grow in the warmer months, kelp only grows when it’s cold. That means it could prove an off-season bumper crop for otherwise summertime-only seafood harvesters. Walrus and Carpenter downsizes from 7 to 3 employees in the winter, Opton-Himmel said, and kelp could help him keep the other four on the payroll all year long.

“ ‘I’d love to keep all 6 on year-round,’ Opton-Himmel said.”

More here.

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When Life Gives You Snails …

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 12, 2014| 6 Comments »

… turn them into escargots.

Lalita Clozel has a great story at the NY Times today about snails that nobody wanted.

She writes, “On this storm-weathered tip of Mont Saint-Michel Bay, the sweeping tides have washed away the line between land and sea. Fishermen drive their wheeled boats straight into the bay to gather their harvest: an assortment of shellfish prized all over France.

“But now they are finding their nets weighed down by an invasive species: the crépidule, or Atlantic slipper shell, a curious type of sea snail that has spread from the East Coast of the United States.

“Oyster and mussel producers here have watched helplessly as the colony has taken over their beautiful bay, flush with phytoplankton, the micro-organisms that make it a haven for all manner of shellfish and tint the water turquoise.

“Enter Pierrick Clément, a local entrepreneur who looked at the encroaching Atlantic slipper shell and asked an unthinkable question in a town that has built its livelihood on bountiful seafood: Would people eat the insidious creature?

“ ‘As a businessman, I see an opportunity here,’ he said. …

“The community of Cancale now finds itself torn between disgust and relief at Mr. Clément’s project to fish and sell the sea snails for consumption.

“After years of administrative haggling, he has coaxed local municipalities and producers to back his project and begin a campaign to rehabilitate the snail’s image. …

“His pilot factory, among the bustling oyster plants in nearby Le Vivier-sur-mer, ships to a few stores and restaurants in France, Spain and Germany.

“Eventually he hopes to process as much as 100,000 tons of slipper shells per year — enough to offset their growth in the bays.” More here.

This entrepreneur’s adaptability fits with what my father used to say about the French secret of beauty. It was along the lines of Feature what you’ve got.

“If you have a big nose,” he said, “hang a beer can on it.”

Photo: Catalina Martin-Chico for The New York Times

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350 Years (Not Counting the Manissean Indians’ Years)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 19, 2011|

A swell time was had by all at the 350th anniversary of British settlers landing their boats on the shores of what is still the smallest community in the smallest state! The sun shone, the speakers were brief, and lots of pictures were taken.

I thought we had come a long way as a country when several speakers, including the governor, acknowledged that the Manissean Indians were there first and that there would be another ceremony at the Indian Cemetery the following weekend, with another commemorative marker.

The governor, who had earlier visited an oyster aquaculture area by boat, was brief and gracious. Interesting speakers included a Rear Admiral with a surname that is pronounced — I kid you not — Neptune. He gave the chief of police an award for a risky rescue at sea last year.

Dutch Consul General Kibbelaar was there because it was a Dutch navigator who originally named the island as he sailed by without landing. British Consul General Budden, based in Boston, made jokes about his brother who is the Consul General in Vancouver and the bet he intended to collect since Boston won hockey’s Stanley Cup. Budden was invited because the British were the ones who landed at Settlers’ Rock 350 years ago. He said that Britain today is the biggest foreign investor in Rhode Island. The chorus of the island school (which had recently graduated all seven seniors) sang the Alma Mater and “America the Beautiful.”

Gov. Lincoln Chafee (in green blazer)

 

 

 

 

 

 

First Warden Kim Gaffett (in straw hat) and governor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dutch Consul General Kibbelaar (in white suit)

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