Eastern oyster

The pleasures and perils of Crassostrea virginica

A rather delicate display of Eastern oysters / Photo copyright Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant, licensed under Creative Commons

We are the bold. We are the oyster eaters.

Late last year, while this newsletter was on break, Texas-sourced oysters made hundreds of people across the South ill. Tests indicated the presence of norovirus, which tends to prompt what we call “stomach flu.” And how does an oyster come to carry norovirus? Generally by being doused in untreated human sewage.

Nonetheless, last week I convened a group of writer friends to feast on raw Gulf oysters.

“We have to love oysters,” Rick Bragg once said of male writers, mocking some of our ritualistic behaviors. “We have to sit around a table in some sun-blasted shack on some desolate, mosquito-infested cay and slurp ’em right out of the shell. Or they take our vowels away.” In our case, the setting…