Raw Material

An enthusiast can make almost anything interesting for a little while; things get silly only when they insist their preoccupation defines the cosmos and vice versa. Andreas Ammer has the good sense to make his Portrait of an Oyster short and cheeky, thereby keeping his adulation for the bivalve more or less restrained. For what might appear to the casual diner as an occasional indulgence is for Ammer a profound subject. “The task of writing a ‘portrait’ of the oyster,” he remarks, “involves a problem of almost quantum-mechanical dimensions.” This is the paradoxical nature of the quest: The oyster can’t see, hear, or smell us, and we can’t fully know the oyster without ending its life. To see it bare is to kill it; shucking severs the life-binding muscles used to keep its flared shell tightly closed. Finding a way to enjoy an oyster without dispatching it — Ammer notes one recipe that mimics the slippery dollop by substituting a blob of salty minced raw lamb on the half shell — would be a “process of emancipation, humanity’s self-assured farewell to the Dark Ages of eating live creatures.”

Oysters aren’t exactly considered dark age food and are far more egalitarian than one might think, having spent similar lengths of time as proletarian budget rations and as an exclusive epicurean delicacy. The draw for all social groups lies less in sustenance than in primordial eroticism; the world of oysters is full of winking eyes, shining droplets, and periwinkle smoothness. Ammer doesn’t shy away from the lewdness, but he also finds space for existentialism and quasi religion, seeing in oysters the only food capable of both reducing us to “predators that have to kill their prey before consuming it” and raising us to the level of “ancient god” partaking in “one of the last remaining cultural rites of the animal sacrifice.”

Whether or not wild/tame or man/god is really the dichotomy that oysters stir within us, they certainly connote the crossing of a line between before and after, poor and rich, celibate and sexed, innocent and knowing. Ammer doesn’t explain the transformation, but he does provide enough examples from art, literature, philosophy, and popular culture to make the case for its universal application. Like a first kiss, one’s first raw oyster sits lodged deep in the memory. Mine was many years ago, with two friends on an autumn drive along the Donegal coast, six half shells for a fiver from a fishmonger in Dunfanaghy. It was a botched attempt for my friends, but for me a kitchen door was kicked open in my mind: to tongue that glassy, salty thing was to walk into a place where the inconceivable was but one more thing to experience. Nothing I have eaten since, good or bad — not the Ligurian focaccia, the Orkney scallops, the caterpillars in Zimbabwe, the catfish stomach in China, nor my aunt’s horrid jellied aspic — can compete with the vibrancy, the instant recall, or the longevity in the brain of those Irish oysters. Every buck-a-shuck since — along with several dubious personal acts — has occurred with one foot on that distant pier. Oysters may not make you shockproof, but they damn well help.

Ammer’s world is mostly clean and pearly, but there is a muddy underside that we see all too briefly when he dips his toe into the mire of the oyster trade, where exorbitant gains can be made through cunning marketing and deceptive offerings. And it must be said that the journalism is a little haphazard; a German television producer and writer of radio plays, Ammer is more at home in an aesthetic milieu. (His Canadian translator, Renée von Paschen, may have a thing for the aquatic, given that her previous work includes a natural history of sea horses.) So it isn’t surprising that he finds oysters “have more in common with art than with food,” particularly visual art, which forms an important aspect of the book. Indeed, this portrait contains many scintillating oyster-related paintings, illustrations, and photographs, plus lines of poetry (though, oddly, he overlooks Seamus Heaney’s “Oysters”). Ammer makes use of both imagery and verse to expand his placement of the oyster in its “struggle with humans for world domination.” (There was never much of a contest; we have taken them twice to the brink of extinction, saving them both times only because we desire to go on devouring them.)

Among Ammer’s many literary allusions, including to Aristotle, Rousseau, and Goethe, the reference to Kant, who wrote of oysters in his Physical Geography, raises a small but notable red flag. Ammer quotes a passage from that 1802 compilation in which the German philosopher mentions oysters growing on trees and retorts with not a little glee, “Here — and I have always wanted to write this sentence — Kant errs, giving a misleading report of a land where oysters grow on trees.”

Yet it is Ammer who errs. There is such a land and such a variety: the West African mangrove oyster (Crassostrea tulipa), which affixes itself to the root of the mangrove tree. He errs again when he writes that “there are hardly any traditional oyster fishers left anywhere in our day and age,” adding that such practices occur “only in North America, primarily in the Gulf of Mexico and in Chesapeake Bay.” In the mangrove forests that line the banks of the Gambia and Casamance Rivers, however, oysters are hand harvested by women who then steam them, shell them, and sell them. In 2021, I spent months with them, sitting in their canoes, stripping and cooking oysters with them, and joining them in the markets of Banjul, thick with flies, as they hawked the green, rubbery catch at fifty dalasis per cup. It may not be as romantic as the methods and salons described by Ammer, but no portrait is complete without mention of such labour.

The unfortunate omission draws attention to Ammer’s myopic geography (his “journey around the world” begins in Europe, moves to the United States, and only briefly mentions Japan and Colombia), but it serves to underscore his point that oysters remain a mystery, even to enthusiasts and proclaimed experts. In another reflection of the paradoxical puzzles of studying them, oysters belong to that select category of things whose mystic essences are stymied, extinguished even, by too much close‑up examination: butterflies, wine, Werner Herzog films, unconditional love, good prose. The oyster, like all these, leaves in its absence a rainbowed lacquer that lingers long after the shell is tossed.