The Oyster BookA Chronicle of the World’s Most Fascinating Shellfish—Past, Present, and Future
An IACP Cookbook Award finalist.
A fascinating and eye-opening chronicle of the global history of oyster farming, the current state of the industry, and the possibilities of investing in oyster farming as a solution to food and climate challenges from veteran oyster farmer Dan Martino.
The oyster is one of Earth’s oldest animals, and fossil records show humans have enjoyed them for hundreds of thousands of years. But like so many other creatures, wild oysters were driven to near extinction by overconsumption and pollution. The Clean Water Act passed in 1972 marked a turning point for water quality, and decades later, we’re witnessing a renaissance in oyster culture as the rise of aquaculture (ocean farming) attempts to supply a growing demand for oysters that increases exponentially year after year.
Internationally renowned oyster farmer Dan Martino guides readers through this fascinating history before presenting a detailed breakdown of the current state of the oyster industry as only an insider can describe it. He discusses husbandry, nursery, and farm techniques; the practical side of working with local government to set up a farm; tips for selling into the market; and what qualities make for the perfect oyster. He details the various global styles of farming and the species of oysters farmed, explaining how they differ in size, texture, shape, and taste—characteristics referred to as “merroir,” to parallel the way “terroir” illuminates how the origin of place affects taste in wine.
The oyster has never been more relevant as we look to the future and the many challenges presented by climate change and a growing population. Martino explores how the current land-based food production system risks collapse as it tries to keep up with growing demand, and oyster farming, which uses no land and minimal freshwater input, is a natural alternative to more resource-intensive food sources. Oysters are also exceptionally good at capturing carbon, making them a necessary element in the quest for climate change solutions.
The Oyster Book is an exploration of the past, present, and future of humanity’s relationship with the oyster, highlighting how humans can learn from our mistakes and harness the oyster’s potential for a more sustainable future.
Dan Martino was a TV producer for a decade when he stumbled upon oyster farming while filming a show. The opportunities within the oyster farming industry were so apparent that Dan promptly changed careers and started his own farm, Cottage City Oysters, off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard with his brother Greg. With over a decade of farming under his belt, Dan and the Cottage City Oyster Farm have become international leaders within the 3D regenerative farming industry.
Dan Martino
“I didn’t necessarily eat oysters or care too much for oysters.” is not the kind of thing you would expect to hear from an oyster farmer. But that’s where Dan Martino was when he go into oyster farming. Today Dan is the author of The Oyster Book and founder of Cottage City Oysters. He shares his journey from TV production to becoming a leading voice in sustainable aquaculture/merroir. Dan recently spoke to us abut his book and explained how things fell into place.
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BAF: Well, I guess I’ll say congratulations on the book. It’s been out for a little while now. Well, I have to ask, so how did you get started in this? Because you come from a pretty non-traditional aqua farming background.
Dan Martino: Right. I don’t know how far back to go. I graduated college doing TV production stuff. So I was making TV shows for National Geographic and Discovery Channel and having a lot of fun doing that and meeting really interesting people all the time. And that career led me to discovering the Billion Oyster Project in New York, the year that it started and went and documented that for a TV show. And then that was just the eye opening, the door of the aquaculture world opening itself to me. And just, I don’t know if you’ve had the chance to talk to Pete Malinowski or any of the people at the Billion Oyster Project or Fisher Island Oysters is where his family originated, but their passion for the environment and economies and sustainable food creation, and it just really resonated at that time. And so yeah, I just kind of jumped into it.
BAF: I always like to ask, was there an ‘aha’ moment when you realized-
Dan Martino: Yeah, I think when we were filming in New York and we’re standing in the middle of the city and there’s helicopters flying overhead and there’s boats and you’re actually seeing New York from the water, which is something I had never seen the city from the water. So it just seemed like this very out of place, manmade structure within the Hudson River. And then Pete was pulling out all these little baby oysters that were covered in crabs and covered in all kinds of just marine life. And that I think was the aha moment of like, oh, right, there’s this entire other planet of the ocean that is surrounding us that none of us really think about or take for granted. It seems so alien, the ocean world. And so that was kind of the spark, I think.
BAF: Well, certainly that sounds like a great way to get involved in a worthwhile and interesting project of its own. I could see how that would be inspiring. I was curious, so what is it about the oysters specifically that you found so fascinating? Because I have my own theories about oysters, so I’m just curious what…
Dan Martino: I’d love to hear…
BAF: But I’m not farming them.
Dan Martino: Yeah, no, I think it was … I live in a beautiful location that is the outdoors. I’ve just always loved to be outdoors. And so I think one was that time in my life, was trying not to be behind a computer screen as much as I was spending time behind cameras and editing. And so a part of what I wanted out of life was to be more connected to the outdoors and more connected to the environment. And then this thing, the oyster was kind of pitched to me in a way as like, “Hey, you can farm these. People farm these for a living. They make a good living doing it. ” It’s a lifestyle of being outdoors and being connected and being dirty and the antithesis of digital screens and computers. And so that was very appealing. And it was just a sense of adventure and a sense of, hey, this is a foot into this industry that if you wanted to do this, the opportunities are there to start a company.
And I didn’t necessarily eat oysters or care too much for oysters at the time. It was kind of more of a … I had never thought of them as an actual crop or I probably had never thought of them at all, in fact. So then you start to learn about, well, how they better the environment and how they can protect our shorelines from coastal erosion and how they increase water quality and how they provide habitat for lobsters and crabs. And you kind of just go down the education of what the oyster is and the keystone species that it is for the ocean. And it seemed like it was just pulling me towards it. It seemed like a thing I needed to be a part of, I wanted to be a part of. It seemed exciting. And my brother and I were looking for a company that we could kind of start and work together on something.
And so this checked off that box as well. And so yeah, it kind of just steamballed into a lifelong kind of passion.
BAF: I found it interesting that you said you weren’t particularly an oyster fan at the time.
Dan Martino: Yeah.
BAF: And I can relate to that myself. I’m fascinated by oysters and more I’ve learned about them, but I don’t enjoy consuming them.
Dan Martino: Right. Why is that? A texture thing or a taste thing or a …
BAF: I don’t see what the big, because it sounds horrible to say, and I hope I’m not going to cause offense to anybody. I don’t see what the big deal is about the taste. The taste doesn’t do anything. Partly it’s also texture. I don’t know why. It never appeals to me for, I guess, a variety of reasons.
Dan Martino: I would suggest that you probably haven’t had that aha oyster yet.
BAF: Well, actually, I have indulged in a po’boy oyster po’boy in New Orleans. That was pretty good. I will say that. And I do try them from time to time. I even found a pearl in one once, a very small one…
Dan Martino: Yeah. No, I get it. I think I had a similar … I grew up in Houston, Texas, right? So you don’t eat raw oysters in Houston. It’s more like what you described in New Orleans. It’s po’boy oysters, or they’re cooked, or they’re rockefeller, or they’re fried, or they’re grilled. So I never really thought of them as a food. It was always just a weird thing. But then New England, you start to eat oysters raw in New England. They’re much more … Or France, for instance, can be high quality enough oysters that you’re consuming them naked with no condiments on them. And then all of a sudden it gets into a level of … It’s like wine. You start to notice that, oh, even though this is the exact same animal, but when it’s grown on the Cottage City oyster farm or the Vineyard Haven oyster farm, they taste different.
Well, why is that? And what am I tasting? And it’s so hard to describe the flavors of the ocean. It’s nothing like the flavors on land that we’re really accustomed to. And so then it becomes this umami … And you start looking, you really start … Most education on the subject is within the Asian cultures because they’ve been eating from the sea forever. The European model of food, the hoofed animals, the livestock, the wheat, the grains is really what was imported into America with all of the early colonists. They brought the food with them that they knew. But when you start looking at the Asian food scene and what they’ve kind of grown up with over thousands of years, it’s seafood. And so that’s where you really start to … You can really educate yourself from … They do oyster pancakes and oyster omelets and oyster pies and oyster soups…
It’s a main staple of their food system. So that’s really where my recent kind of diving into Korean recipes or Japanese recipes, and how do they describe oysters and think about oysters? And it kind of gives a different perspective.
BAF: Backtracking for a second, I did have grilled oysters in Vancouver, which I thought were great. I’d even go back several times and it was run by an Asian family, the little stand at the market. And you touched on something which I’ve always found interesting was the fact that oysters in some ways have become a bit like wine.You’re given a menu, you’re given a choice of selection, and you’re given the taste breakdown.
Dan Martino: 100%. They’re very much … So the concept in wine is the concept of terroir, which is the flavor of the land. It’s what land characteristics, whether it be the acidity or the soil types or the water types and the amounts of water go into the grape of the wine. And then from there, the farmer or the wine purveyor is taking that grape and using different barrels of wood and different fermenting systems to create that bottle of wine. And so that’s the terroir, the taste of the land. In the oyster world, it’s called merroir and it’s the taste of the sea. And so you really start to understand … And that’s where I’m at right now in the farming mindset is kind of like, what are the marine influences that are making my oyster taste a certain way? And can I augment them or use them in some way to make my flavors and my oyster more pronounced?
Or are there different growing techniques I can use that’ll give me different flavor results within the same body of water? And that’s where, like you said, you sit down, you get a menu, it’s almost like wine where you’re picking the different oyster. The problem in that right now is that the hundreds of years that the burgundy monks and the sistine monks experimented with wine where they sat in France and they sat there and they tried every barrel type possible and every grape type possible, that hasn’t happened yet with oysters. In fact, it hasn’t happened yet with any marine species, right? We haven’t tried all the different farming combinations yet to understand really what creates the perfect Bordeaux or whatever it might be. So that’s kind of where the farming oyster world is at right now is there are certain oysters that taste better than others or cleaner or saltier, but we don’t know why.
And we’re trying to figure out how that whole merroir process works.
BAF: Fascinating because this must be a whole new realm that people are just discovering farmers like yourself are figuring out because the monks haven’t been farming oysters. So you guys are the ones that are breaking new ground, for lack of a better expression.
Dan Martino: We’re the monks. Unfortunately, I think wine would’ve been a little bit more fun to experiment with than oysters, but yeah, you’re exactly right. That’s kind of where the industry’s at right now is there’s not even a Wikipedia page for the concept of merroir yet. The Oyster Book, that was the first true deep dive into meroir and the concept of this that’s really been published to date. It’s even that new of a concept that people just are just now kind of coming to terms with it.
BAF: I was a little surprised when somebody had told me that, that it was groundbreaking in that sense. You just figure the oysters, there’s plenty of books about them, but nobody really talks about farming. They talk about fishing them or retrieving them, but not the actual in detail, the farming and the future of it as the merroir aspect.
Dan Martino: And I think that’s where that was the motivation of writing it was that when I had started this process over a decade ago of farming oysters, I’m doing my homework and my due diligence, and I’m just trying to absorb as much information as there was about farming oysters because the more you educate yourself, the more chance of success you’ll have at doing that endeavor and really found that I was not satisfied with the literature that was out there on just how, or the examples or the YouTube videos or any of it. It’s all very new, and so a lot of just examples are not present. And so that became a motivation for the book was just let’s document how they’re farmed in China, how they’re farmed in France, how they’re farmed across America, the different ways that people can do it. And I think that is why a lot of colleges and academia are using the book now as kind of required reading in that sense for an aquaculture 101 class or any kind of aquaculture farm looking education component, because it’s one of the first books that’s actually just laid it all out there as to what’s kind of happening.
BAF: Like we said, a bit of a groundbreaker. So what’s interesting about the book is that you literally started at the beginning about, I think you said 4.56 billion years ago to document the evolution of the oyster or not just the oyster, the shellfish in general, you also break down the different biovalves that are out there.
Dan Martino: Yeah. I love history. I love the concept of learning from history and looking back in time to be able to grasp how everything has come to be at this certain point, because then I believe you can kind of just continue that trajectory to see into the future in some respects. If you don’t know where you came from, there’s no way you’re going to know where you’re going. And so it started from the point of view of like, right, what is the history of this oyster? And then it’s unbelievable just how nature can reach certain evolutionary designs that are almost so perfect that the animal doesn’t need to change anymore. The world changes around the oyster and the oyster just keeps on doing what it’s doing, filtering seawater, eating the algae, converting sunlight into energy and a multivitamin for the animals that consume it.And you have to look at ocean organisms to find these kind of oldest, most perfect designs of evolution. There’s no land animals that are still around that haven’t gone unchanged for 400 million years. That’s just not the way life works, but you do find tons of these animals in the ocean. They’ve just kind of evolved and done it for way longer, way better. And then I wrote the oyster book and I’ve got it kind of done. I give it to Agate, my publisher, and they’re like, “Well, could you do a chapter about the differences between oysters, clams, mussels, and scallops?” I go, “Why?” And they’re like, “Well, we don’t really know the difference.” And then you start to realize, oh, right, most people couldn’t tell you the difference between a clam and an oyster. No,
BAF: That’s why I was intrigued by it because I think that’s what struck me is that at least people, I think people could tell what they look like, but what their physiology is and their role is, I don’t think people would be aware of it.
Dan Martino: And that’s a really interesting concept is why are we so disconnected from our oceans? This is an environment that covers more than 70% of the planet. It’s an environment that creates two thirds of all the oxygen that we breathe. It’s the environment where life started. It’s where we, eventually all of land life came out of this body of water, and yet we don’t eat from it much. We don’t generate energy from it much. We don’t do anything with it. It’s just kind of like this giant portion of the planet that is not utilized by humanity.
BAF: In my mind, I think it would probably be because humans generally don’t do too well when they’re out in the ocean by themselves. You can walk in the woods and pick some fruit. It’s hard to go in the ocean and look Around too much.
Dan Martino: 100%. It’s actually, I’m working on a new book and this is kind of the topic of that book is that it’s taken our societies and the culmination of so many different types of technology advances for us to finally move into the farming of the ocean. We’ve been farming land 12,000 years, and here we are only in the last maybe three decades have we really started to farm the ocean. It took our species that long to do okay in a boat, as you’re saying. And so it’s fascinating in the grand scheme of things, the cradle of ocean agriculture has started.
BAF: Is that a Western thing? Because certainly the Asian cultures have been doing it much longer.
Dan Martino: What’s interesting is that yes, they’ve been growing seaweeds for a couple hundred years. It’s nowhere near land agriculture. It’s nowhere near the thousands of years.
And if it is like carp farming has been around for potentially thousands of years, I think a lot of it is that the oceans have just been so bountiful for so long that the need to farm them really hasn’t been there. We’ve just been able to take a boat out, scoop up nets full of fish and bring it home. Only in the mid 1990s did the wild fishery stocks really collapse. So that’s really recent as far as human history goes. So it’s really only in the last couple decades that we’ve even thought about the need to farm and domesticate and cultivate the oceans, which is unreal, right? What an opportunity to, especially when you look at climate change and how it’s going to impact our food systems in the future. And then you’re saying all of a sudden we’ve been able to untap the largest environment on earth through our technology and our biology and our understandings of hatcheries.
And all of a sudden we have this, it’s almost like a whole nother planet that we’ve discovered that we can start farming from and cultivating and domesticating and using. It’s just fascinating that that’s happening now. How could you not want to be a part of it? I guess it’s kind of where my brain jumps to.
BAF: No, well, certainly. I wish you were a little more enthusiastic about it, but oysters are interested because they seem to have two different lives in the sense historically they were food for the poor originally. Then I guess supply and demand became, they were then perceived as for the wealthy, a sign of decadence.
Dan Martino:No, that’s a hundred percent right. And I think lobster followed the same kind of … It seems like, I guess that’s testament to the bounty of the oceans like we’re talking about where you have something that’s so plentiful that everybody gets to enjoy it, so everybody does, and then it becomes almost extinct in the sense that we’ve just over harvest. And now we’re at a time where we’re seeing a renaissance in oyster consumption. Numbers are up higher than they’ve ever been, and that’s largely due to farming as opposed to the wild harvest. And so it’s pretty interesting. Yeah.
BAF: I think there’s probably a third aspect to the oysters that now people have really become aware of their importance to the environment. So they’re being farmed not only for consumption, but just to clean up local waters.
Dan Martino: Yeah. And that’s the big … What would you call it? It’s kind of the big aha moment, I think, for the general public is that a lot of us come to view farming or we hear about farming where it’s these monocrop corn farms that are spraying monsanto pesticides and polluting, and especially in America and the food is cancer causing and there’s more colors and numbers in our food than there are actually natural ingredients. And then you hear about this thing called oyster farming that doesn’t use any of those pesticides or harmful materials, and it doesn’t pollute the environment. It betters the environment. And so it really is this switch in our mental capacities to understand that not all farming has to be destructive. In fact, if it’s done properly, it shouldn’t be destructive. And so I think that’s really the message that hopefully gets out there more is that shellfish farming in particular, seaweed farming in particular, some species of fish, these are things that can be done highly sustainably, which is a really positive thing for the future, right?
BAF: What I found encouraging about the oyster farming is at a fairly grassroots level. It’s just people locally are researching it and setting up the beds themselves and just trying to clean up their own little area. And I thought that was, as I said, I found that very encouraging to see that.
Dan Martino: I do too. The trouble with it, there’s positives and negatives. The way the fisheries are set up is that an individual has to get the permit to farm the oceans from their local community. So you can’t have big ag come in and get a bunch of ocean plots. The system is not set up in that way, which is good if you think that ‘big ag’ is the problem with our food system. It’s not good if you’re trying to develop a farming method around the world in a very quick scale way, scale it up quickly. Well, now you’re relying on the little individuals and their small little bank accounts to fund this entire thing. And then it also leads to the turnover of, well, when I’m 90 and I can’t farm anymore, if I’m not allowed to sell my farm to a corporation or a next generation, how do we actually continue this scalability up without losing the productivity of that farmer?
And so that’s really the predicament of it is yes, grassroots systems are incredible and amazing, but how do we get it to the next level of big global money and big global products and big global productivity?
BAF: Oh, certainly. Well, the advantage with the grassroots level is that it’s not removed as part of the community. People see it and they’re involved. It’s not a big corporation out there doing it. People serve in the nearby docks and harbors are just planting these things and they can see firsthand. And it becomes an educational thing. Schools get involved. I thought that was all terrific to see that. Maybe I should ask, so what’s next for you? You mentioned a book.
Dan Martino: Yeah, I’m writing about … So we do a lot of tours and education and talks, and the number one question has always been, how is climate change going to affect the oysters and the shellfish and the seaweeds? And so part of the oyster book touched on that from the oysters perspective of how shellfish might fare in the future, but it kind of raised the larger question of like, right, what’s going to happen to our food supply if we raise the temperature four degrees Celsius on earth? What does that look like? Do we have corn in that future? And the answer is no. Believe it or not, a lot of our old world farming systems that are 12,000 years old have been adapted and evolved and augmented to fit within this perfect climate that we’ve had for the last 100,000 years. And as soon as you shift that climate off by a couple degrees, our modern day food system kind of starts to fall apart in a lot of ways.
And so it’s really examining. It’s been reading scientific journals for the last two, three years of just really coming to understand the 4.5 billion year history of climate change and how we’ve been through these amazing climate cycles and what species have survived those and which ones haven’t. Obviously the oyster’s one of the ones that tends to fare very well regardless of the climate on earth. And so it really is kind of looking at how is our technology within the farm world evolving with AI and with CRISPR and with biotech, greenhouses and indoor climate controlled spaces and eventually moon food agriculture and space agriculture, coupled with the Blue Revolution and this brand new branch of agriculture where we’re now extracting out of the ocean and kind of how does all these things meld with climate change and what does that world look like? And so that’s kind of really just the deep end of where I’m at right now.
It’s wild.
BAF: Yeah, I can imagine. Well, maybe I could step back. And you mentioned CRISPR and biotech. Has there been any attempts to experiment with oysters with any of those?
Dan Martino: I mean, believe it or not, not really. It’s still so new. That’s what’s fascinating is that the species that we’re farming haven’t been touched by anything except mother nature and evolution for the last 250 million years. Where you look at corn, that’s gone through so many iterations of genetic diversity through human selection. It’s not even natural anymore. The one thing with oysters is they have figured out how to make them asexual, basically. And I go into that in the book a little bit, and that was out of precaution where if you’re going to introduce a Chinese variety of oyster to American water and you want to understand how it might change, you want to make sure that that species won’t procreate and destroy the wild population that’s around it. So a lot of the experiments that took place 1970s, ’80s, they were figuring out basically how to make a nonsexual oyster so that they could carry out some of those experiments.
None of those are really farmed. They just have lend themselves to being one-offs or experiments around the world. So no, we’re still … I think salmon have probably undergone the most genetic modification at this point for marine organisms, and that’s because the first wave of farms that were trying to do salmon farming were kind of treating them like pigs and they were feeding them corn and they were taking this land-based model of farming that wasn’t very good.
BAF: They would dye them pink, so to make them seem more salmon-like.
Dan Martino: Yeah. We don’t need that. That’s where you don’t want Big Ag to get involved with ocean farming is there’s no need for that. And so that’s where the book I’m talking about, writing right now talks about those issues. But no, I would say for the most part, marine organisms have not been human augmented in any way, which is good. We’re at the blank slate kind of history here.
BAF: I guess, so you’re located in Martha’s Vineyard, I believe.
Dan Martino: Yep.
BAF: And you said you give tours and where can people find you unless you don’t want to give me info on it?
Dan Martino: Thank you. Cottagecityoysters.com is the name of the oyster farm. And then danmartino.com is for my books and writing and stuff like that.
BAF: Great. Any big projects along the way other than the book? Are you expanding the farm or…
Dan Martino: Farm’s always growing. Yeah. We’re doing some blue mussels this year, which is exciting for us. The first real second crop that we’ve kind of gotten good at growing. We’ve got all these high school and college kids coming back for the summer to work, which is always fun to surround yourself with youth and kind of feed off of that energy a little bit. So we’re all just super excited to keep growing and just doing cool stuff.
BAF: No, I always like to ask in case I miss something. Is there anything that we didn’t discuss that you like to get out there or like people to know about?
Dan Martino: I would just try to reiterate that eating farmed shellfish in particular is the best sustainable food conscious choice that people can make. Shellfish in particular are some of the most nutrient dense foods on planet earth. They’re just really healthy for us. They don’t give you heart attacks and cancers and all these different things. They’re very good for children to eat. They’re very good for elders to eat. And so just that if there’s any take home message, it’s that farmed shellfish are one of the smartest choices we can make for ourselves, for the planet, for a lot of different reasons. So it’s one of those things of you want to go have spaghetti and meatballs, but instead just pick spaghetti and clams or spaghetti and blue mussels. Or we can as consumers make these kind of educated choices. And so just to put shellfish on the top of everybody’s list is a big win.
BAF: I guess touching on that, it seems that from what I understand of agriculture is that as much as people like the farm salmon or trout or what have you, it’s not that environmentally friendly or it wasn’t. I think they’re making changes, but certainly oyster farming is just doing what nature does naturally.
Dan Martino: No, you’re a hundred percent correct. And so the analogy I make in the book is, the new book is like, when our caveman ancestors invented agriculture, they weren’t looking for the most sustainable species of food to grow. They were just picking things they like to eat because they tasted good and it was just a haphazard. If we were looking for food choices that were sustainable and healthy and bettered the environment and did everything in the most perfect way possible, it would be shellfish and seaweed. Those would be the default items of food that we would grow on planet earth and eat the most of, because they’re bettering the world around us through the cultivation of them. There’s not many things on earth that can do that. And so it’s really just trying to get people to understand that there are better food choices. Some are better than others for different reasons, but on any measurable scale, shellfish and seaweeds are the best choices you can have.
BAF: With climate change, how have the oysters been doing with the environmental changes around them?
Dan Martino: They will do fine. When you look back at some of the warmest times on planet earth in the last 20 million years, you had oysters and clams thriving in Alaska. They were thriving around the North Pole that had no ice at that period of time. They’re in Antarctica along the coast. So they have this ability to proliferate anywhere on planet earth, which is a really good thing. The worry is that if our oceans absorb too much carbon too quickly, they could get acidic, in which case the natural spawn of shellfish could potentially dissolve before they’re able to grow their shells and come to maturity.
Basically, shellfish shells are tums. They’re made out of calcium carbonate. It’s the same thing we eat when we eat a tums. So if you have an acidic ocean, those tums will dissolve before the babies can reach the age to make more babies. But then you start to realize with human ingenuity and our hatchery practices and now our understanding of shellfish biology, all oysters and shellfish that are grown around the world, a lot of them are procreated in a hatchery nowadays by human hands where we’re taking two oysters and getting hundreds of millions of babies from those two oysters that are then planted out on farms and grown. So the argument of the acidic waters becoming too acidic where the babies can no longer survive, we’ve kind of circumvented that issue with our hatcheries, right? We can now cultivate these things without the need of mother nature.
BAF: Sounds like another plus four of the oysters.
Dan Martino: I’m a very optimistic person, and so I try to find the negatives about this animal, and there’s really not many. And that’s the whole reason it’s worth kind of changing your life career and going into it and farming it and just kind of going all in. It’s just a win-win-win for everybody. Well,
BAF: Maybe I’ll have to give oysters another shot. Try and find it.
Dan Martino: Get out there and do it. You got it, man. Or clams or mussels. There’s a bunch of choices.
BAF: Start with the oysters. Okay, Dan. Well, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it. It’s a terrific book and congratulations on it.
Dan Martino: Thank you. And thank you for the platform you’ve put together. It’s an amazing collection and I’m just really honored to be a part of it, so thank you.
BAF: Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you.
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Introduction
The Past
In the Beginning
When Oysters Met Homo-Sapiens
Where Do Babies Come From?
Cultivating Oysters
How the French Tamed the Sea
Japan, To the Rescue!
The West Coast
The American Eastern Oyster
America’s Appetite for the Oyster Grows
The Oyster Wars
The Collapse
The Present
Current Status of the Industry
How to Acquire a Farm
Different Types of Oysters
Don’t Forget the Pearls
Hatcheries vs Wild Spat Collection
Diploid vs. Triploid
Nursery Systems
Quality or Quantity
Types of Farm Methods
What Makes a Quality Oyster
Merroir
France
Australia
Japan
China
Korea
North America
New England
Massachusetts
Rhode Island
Maine
Connecticut
The Chesapeake Bay
The American West Coast
The Future
The Future of Food
Lack of Space
Finite Resources
Work in Progress
It Takes Energy
Solutions
Animal Feeds
Eat Your Carbon Footprint
Wine
Fashion
Sponges to Clean Ocean Plastic
Cosmetics
Spread the Culture
The World Is Your Oyster




