I’ve never really been a fan of oysters before. But the sight of the oyster farm laid out on the exposed sea bed, with the farm workers calmly going about their business pretty much as if they had been tending tomatoes in a greenhouse was surreal enough to make me want to go and have closer look at this terrestrial activity going on in a place which spends half of its time under several metres of water. As luck would have it, the farm belonged to Bertrand (our guide)’s father in law so we were invited in for a closer look and a tasting.
With my limited knowledge of oysters, I always thought you weren’t supposed to eat them unless there was an “R” in the month and this was August. I had also thought this must be something to do with viruses and warm water, but it turns out that it is rather because in the summer it is the breeding season and the osyters become fatty and not to most people’s taste rather than posing any kind of health risk.
First oyster myth debunked.
And also found that some of the oysters, due to pressure from the buyers, were triploid ones (i.e. hybridised to give them an extra set of chromosomes to render them sterile and prevent them wasting 80% of their energy on breeding like they normally do) so they can be harvested all summer. The restaurants coyly refer to these as “ four seasons oysters”. Ask no questions..
I did get the impression that our host would rather not have been messing around with his oysters’ chromosomes, even if, as he told us, the Irish do it all the time to sell to the chic brasseries of Paris, and that he was a little concerned for the health of his other oysters.
But I tried one and, so fresh it didn’t even know it had been picked and bathed in pure Atlantic water, it was quite unlike any oyster I’d ever had before and I was obliged to follow it up rather quickly with a couple more.
And then we bought a load for the evening’s “apéro”, pushed off into the retreating tide and left the oyster farmers tending to their fields on the bottom of the sea.
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