I’m not sure I’ve ever had an Apalachicola oyster. And for someone like me—an oyster-lover and a sometime food writer—once that would have been possible only by concerted avoidance.
Historian Jack Davis describes how sometimes out on Apalachicola Bay, you once could have heard the click of the oyster shells, the small motions of their opening and closing amplified through the bottom of a boat. Oyster eating here goes back thousands of years; by the late nineteenth century, at least one oyster-eating traveler declared that the local oyster beds produced the best-tasting bivalves on the Gulf of Mexico.
Eventually, it became a major industry. Forty years ago, you could find hundreds of skiffs anchored in or near the bay—“at Cat Point, Indian Pass Lagoon, Dry Bar, Hagan’s Flats, 11 Mile, and N…
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