The Oyster Makes Its Return To The Hudson And Chesapeake

What courageous soul first braved the oyster? Surely, our stone-age predecessors had watched crabs eat them, but crabs are belligerent, armored water spiders, not role models.

Bless the intrepid.

At some point people discovered the joys of slurping oysters and then proceeded to eat a lot of them. A ton. So many that oyster populations in many salty waterways, like New York Harbor and the Chesapeake Bay, were destroyed. But, thanks to hard work by a handful of innovative entrepreneurs over the last few years, we’ve seen those areas become fertile grounds for bivalves once again. More on that shortly.

How popular were oysters with North America’s earliest residents? When I was a kid, you could find piles and piles of ancient empty shells left by hungry native Americans along the East Coast. Essentially kitchen trash piles, those heaps are called middens

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