Editor’s note: Welcome to the ‘architecture of food’! Our 10th issue, produced collaboratively with chlorophyll magazine, kicked off last week with Beth Whelan’s excellent essay exploring the significance of “meat and two veg” in the industrial history of Northern England. This week on FFJ, we have a beautiful meditation by Genevieve Bentz on the lessons we can learn from oysters in tumultuous times. Next week’s piece will be published by chlorophyll, and the one after that by FFJ, and so forth — we hope you love the issue as much as we do! - IJBV
A classic symbol of sexuality, oysters are even more slippery than they look. Appreciated for tenderness but overlooked in strength, an ecological linchpin yet desired to the point of destruction, they embody the inherent contradictions required for any of us to survive in this changing world.
By Genevieve Bentz
I grew up shucking fresh oysters, only minutes out of the water. When shucking an oyster — leaning your body weight into the blade until it slides deep and far enough for its shell to finally, reluctantly part — it is hard to absorb how delicate they can be, the salty-sweet flesh splayed open, glisteningly alive. But to write them off as vulnerable is folly. These are creatures whose softness makes them tougher than one can imagine.
Our perception of oysters as defenceless perhaps comes from their reputation as the most “feminine” food that we eat, even more so than milk and eggs and chicken breasts. Their undeniable resemblance to the form of female genitalia peppers art from the Earl of Rochester’s “arch’d on both Sides, lay gaping like an Oyster. I had a Tool before me, which I put in / Up to the Quick, and strait the Oyster shut; / It shut and clung to so fast at ev’ry Stroke” to Jan Steen’s “Girl Eating Oysters,” where a young girl blushes at the viewer as she sprinkles a tray of soft wet folds with salt. Come, the painting seems to beckon. Taste this.
Yet beyond this sexualization, oysters are deeply tied to mythical figures and cultural traditions of womanhood, many of them strong and vital. In ancient Greek mythology, Aphrodite emerges, full-figured, from the sea on an oyster shell. Legends tell of mermaids bedecked with glistening pearls. In coastal Japan, Ama still dive in an over 2,000 year-old tradition. And in coastal New England, where I was raised, Native American women have gathered oysters since prehistoric times.
Female elders in tribes like the Mohegan, Wampanoag, and Pequot taught eighteenth-century European settlers to nurture the oyster reefs buttressing the shore from nor-easter tides and hurricane rip-currents. They bent green twigs into hoops, catching oyster larvae that latched and grew from these branches like leaves. Byssal threads and harvest nets stitched together in long, softly swaying lines which wove through the water. The larvae burrowed into the outside of both living and dead shells, anchoring there for the rest of their lives. Their crystals formed mounds of interwoven shells that spiral in three dimensions like tree rings — which, unlike clams or mussels or other deep-cupped mollusks, were edged by a jagged lip.
With the right conditions, a colony could quickly become a living breakwater, shells fusing into an almost impenetrably solid mass. These ragged, mottled, rock-like reefs created storm-stopping friction between angry waves and the smooth sea floor, and could repair themselves after a lashing.
Early colonists got the hang of the practice. Time passed. Bonds hardened. The cycle began again.
Like many precious things, oysters soon fell victim to their very appeal. As with wine or milk or honey, the flavour of an oyster comes from time and place. New England oysters are soft and sweet because beyond Long Island, there is only the empty Atlantic. The unhindered current brings a bright minerality and just enough turbulence from deeper waters, preventing them from becoming too large or tough. Abundant and cheap, easy to store in nets and baskets hung off decks and piers to open whenever convenient, and a tender meat substitute in stuffings and pies as well as stand-alone tavern snack — 19th-century cookbooks from the region include countless oyster recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Indigenous communities had farmed oysters on the coasts of the United States for thousands of years without causing a crash in the bivalves’ population. Once refrigeration enabled them to be shipped, voracious harvesting by colonizers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rapidly depleted their stocks. When John Smith explored the Chesapeake Bay in 1706, the oyster reefs were so prominent his ships had to steer around them or risk running aground. Since the early days of oyster harvesting, there have been anxieties over their decline: by the 1760s, laws were in place to attempt to maintain population levels on the east coast. But they failed to stop overfishing, and increases in the coastal human population, industrialization, pollution, and marine traffic have all compounded the death spiral.
Today, local oyster populations are estimated to be at 1-2% of historical levels. This absence has effectively dredged the East Coast and turned once-fortified walls of submerged calcium into soft silt dunes. Reefs are crumbling, and floods are getting worse.
In my hometown of Stonington, Connecticut, my neighbour was the designated town shellfish warden. From the shore, you could see him puttering along foggy coves in a small outboard motorboat, hunched in a bright yellow raincoat, and armed with a flashlight, like an aquatic firefly searching for poachers. Ripples from the blades of his motor would fanned out on the water’s surface in an unmistakable shape — that of a silent, softly growing shell.
When found and wrenched from their colonies, oysters may refuse to go gently down our throats. Growing up in coastal New England, it was hard for me to miss signs dotting the beach after hard rains: “Beds: CLOSED. “Toxic: do not eat.” A salmonella outbreak linked to oysters sickened scores of people across dozens of U.S. states, causing twenty hospitalizations, in 2025. That same year six people died from a “flesh-eating” bacteria after consuming raw Gulf Coast oysters. A woman asks my suburban listserv for help installing a ramp for her now quadriplegic husband. Sepsis. A “lucky oyster.”
In small numbers, oysters are vulnerable to pollution rinsing off the land into the sea. One can filter gallons of water an hour, dutifully processing algae and bacteria that then accumulate on their outer shells or are digested into harmless sediment left behind in the current. But in high enough concentrations, a week, sometimes two, is needed for them to purge the pathogens like e. Coli, vibrio vulnificus, and hepatitis A. When they are overwhelmed, poisoned water pools in their flesh and unmoors the bonds inside of their shells. We contaminate them, and they, in turn, contaminate us.
With oyster populations over-harvested and sickened, surviving colonies are vulnerable to the very floods they are no longer able to help prevent. This cycle is quintessentially American: knowledge stolen from Indigenous communities, then forgotten, now begging to be remembered.
As hurricanes continue to rapidly intensify and travel further north into the United States, paying attention to the plight of oysters offers us a way forward.
The US Navy is tuning in, having created artificial beds to help protect its bases. Meanwhile, the Billion Oyster Project in New York City has restored over 150 million oysters to date, protecting the city from storm damage and providing a safe habitat for hundreds of species. The Oyster Institute is developing new oyster substrates out of vinyl, rip-rap, and 3-D printed concrete to foster new reefs, making sea-hives from hexagonal tubes stacked one on top of another and undulating tile forms. Some feature spheres with holes punched out as if wiffle balls for a giant squid; others are prisms with porous sides that look like the first layer of a plaster cast, webbed threads whispering of future support.
The many Indigenous communities known for careful oystering practices have remained key players in restoration initiatives. The Rappahannock Tribe has developed a mobile aquaculture unit to restore oysters in the Rappahannock watershed, while the Nansemond Indian Nation raises and seeds thousands of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay as part of their tribal commitment to river and waterway stewardship. Andfor individuals who want to get involved in oyster preservation, collecting oyster shells helps new reef construction; states like Maryland will provide equipment, support, and baby oysters for volunteers to grow in cages off docks and piers.
Above all, it would serve us to think harder about the oyster. Its story is one of subversion: while popular culture has immortalized their vulvic form, oysters are actually born male, and can change sex in response to environmental conditions, physiological stressors, or even the reproductive makeup of oysters around them. Some oyster populations have been shown to be able to do this even more than once, proving themselves endlessly adaptable and stubbornly resistant to definition.
The contradictions of oysters remind us how to handle incongruity, to move forward in a warming and storming world. While it was lust that doomed New England’s native reefs — our insatiable appetite for delicate flesh bringing us close to swallowing the species whole — the aphrodisiac oyster reminds us that things can be at once soft and hard, fragile and resilient, independent and communal, an emblem of both grit and beauty.
From the oyster we can learn how to also grow quietly, deliberately, and bravely in the face of potential annihilation. Herein lies their slick truth: while alone we may be fragile, together we might be able to absorb and divert some of the power in the floods to come.
Genevieve Bentz is a lawyer living in Washington, D.C. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Citron Review, the Nassau Literary Review and on Substack. She has previously worked as a staff writer for the Brooklyn Quarterly and a ghostwriter.
i absolutely loved reading this. beautiful, moving and informative <3
Great read! Beautiful writing!