Is it safe to eat the po' boy?
Not quite two weeks ago, on June 5, Sal Sunseri opened the first New Orleans Oyster Festival. Postponed a few years because of Hurricane Katrina, the affair, in the city's French Quarter, included contests for wine and oyster pairings as well as oyster shucking — basically, cracking open the shell to expose the slippery gray meat for slurping. On June 10, however, the Sunseri family business, P&J Oyster Co., which in 134 years had become the chief oyster purveyor to some of the city's most esteemed restaurants, effectively closed. Not only was it running short of the delicacies, but people were afraid to eat them. "We're mourning," Sunseri says.
Few cities treat seafood with the high reverence of New Orleans, where shrimp is often eaten for breakfast (with buttery grits), oysters for lunch (on a po'boy, or sandwich) and crawfish for dinner (étouffée). But those traditions may become a casualty of the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The oil spill that has brought President Obama to the region for the fourth time in the past month has closed nearly one-third of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing. It is potentially catastrophic for Louisiana's core $2.4 billion seafood industry, which provides much of the nation's fish, shrimp, oysters and crabs.
The region's angst is understandable. New Orleans' main highway, Interstate 10, is lined with billboards showing mounds of fried seafood. Castnet Seafood, a shop in the largely residential New Orleans East section, is still teeming with customers buying shrimp, fish and oysters to store in their freezers. But the owner, Kent Bondi, fears that soon, "that rush is going to come to a complete end." And there is the vexing question: Is the seafood safe to eat? A recent Castnet customer returned with a bag of fish, saying, "It smelled like oil," and demanded a refund. Bondi told her flatly that the catfish was farm-raised, so there was no chance it had been tainted by oil. "It's psychological," he says of the fear.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: TIME.
Photo by Peter Van Agmael, Magnum for TIME
