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The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell
By Mark Kurlansky
Ballantine, 307 pages, $29.95

As those brave enough to go swimming off the coast of New York City can attest, seaweed isn't the only thing floating around. There are also peeled-off bikini bottoms, withered Band-Aids and the occasional Filet-o-Fish wrapper. It's hard to fathom a time when the waters were clean and teeming with oysters to the point where people would pick them up with their hands and eat them on the spot. In the late 19th century, Coney Island pushcarts sold oysters for a penny apiece. Ten cents was the going rate for a plate of 10, the same price as a hot dog.

Anyone whose stomach rumbled or whose eyes bulged at the abovementioned is bound to find The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell eminently delicious. Mark Kurlansky, the writer who brought us Cod: A History of the Fish and Salt: A World History, has reined in his focus with his latest project. Now he uses the oyster as the framework to tell the story of the making and self-mangling of New York.

Part marine biology, part environmentalist tract, The Big Oyster is a sepia-toned love letter to New York. Starting with Henry Hudson's 1609 discovery of New York harbour, Kurlansky zips through the story of New York flipbook-style, and the wild frontier dissolves into the overdeveloped metropolis we know. Oysters might strike some as too trivial a subject to reflect the history of the Big Apple, but until recently, they were the one food that united all New Yorkers. When Hudson landed in what is now New York, the estuary of the Hudson River contained 350 square miles of oyster beds. The natives, or Lenapes, were great oyster fans, and introduced them to the Dutch settlers. (In what must be one of the unfairest trade-offs in history, the Dutch introduced them to venereal disease.) Their relationship was tense from the get-go, and Kurlansky posits that their one commonality was a love of the bivalves.

This affection was shared by generations to come. New Yorkers have always listened to their bellies, and they didn't shrink from the task of figuring out what to do with all the oysters on hand. By the mid-1800s, New York was the oyster capital of the world, and everybody ate them. Canneries were established, cookbooks ran recipes calling for 150 oysters, and sawdust-floored oyster houses offered the Canal Street Plan, an all-you-can-eat oyster special for six cents.

The oysters were plentiful and enormous, but they were also doomed: In an unfortunate confluence, the local oyster supply started to dry up just when the foreign markets were most ravenous for New York's Crassostrea Virginica oysters. With the local oyster population dwindling, the oystering industry had to resort to transplanting oyster seeds farther afield, and oyster boats would return from places such as Connecticut and Long Island Sound and tie up to the New York waterfront. In the late 1800s, the floating oyster market consisted of 200 sloops, carrying at least six million oysters at a time.

Of greater concern were the sanitation problems. Put simply, oysters can't stay alive in dirty water. Each oyster filters between 20 and 50 gallons of water through its gills every day, and when their nourishment contains chemicals, they suffer, as do the people who eat them.

All along, the city neglected to take the right steps to stay clean. Trash was left to rot in the open, or be eaten by the pigs that roamed the streets. In the 1650s, the city built open sewers, and sewage was backing up all over the place. A century later, Kurlansky writes, "the quality of Manhattan water had become so bad that out-of-town horses refused to drink it." At the tail end of oyster-mania, in 1910, when the idea of oysters ever being considered a delicacy was still inconceivable, the local waters were in shoddy shape. "Sewage could be seen among the swimmers and sometimes children would emerge covered in filth," Kurlansky writes. And oysters were getting a bad rap, being blamed for typhoid and cholera outbreaks. The entire estuary was befouled by 1927, and the remaining oyster beds were closed.

Kurlansky's tale is promiscuously researched, citing commission reports, diary entries, old newspaper articles and cookbooks that date back to the 17th century. Sometimes the book feels bogged down with excessive material the author came across in the historical society (how many 19th-century recipes do we really need to understand the oyster's popularity?), but its tendency to digress is also its strong suit. Clearly, Kurlansky was faced with an embarrassment of research riches, and many of the delightful tidbits he includes keep the book feeling carbonated, even if they do feel freestanding. Some pearls: Sturgeon caviar was the peanut of the early 1900s, with bars typically serving free bowls of the stuff; Central Park used to be Seneca Village, home to the Seneca Indians; and when New York's first prostitute, Griet Reyniers, married a pirate in the mid-1700s, the couple moved to Long Island and became wealthy landowners.

Indeed, the book often feels more concerned with New York than with oysters, and the oyster material feels as if it has been slapped onto the page as an afterthought. In the bibliography, New York history books take up five pages, whereas there is only one page on oysters. The Big Oyster can feel slightly third-hand, and could have done with some up-close and sensual writing about oysters. At one point Kurlansky says that "oysters taste like eating the sea," and more of this mouthwatering prose might have righted the balance between the book's two subjects, and allowed the billboarded stars, the oysters, to shine and squirt through.

Thanks to the efforts of myriad environmentalist groups, our waters are in better shape than they were a century ago, and the Hudson is now considered one of the healthier estuaries in the North Atlantic region. New York is still not producing its own oysters, but all hope is not lost. New York oysters have been around for the last 520 million years and, despite the pollution, my money's on them.

Lauren Mechling is a New York writer and oyster lover. She co-authored The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber and All Q, No A, due out in June.