This is part 2 of a 2-part series exploring the future of farming seafood in the Gulf. We know this: demand for seafood is soaring. We won't be able to sustainably meet that demand from wild-caught fisheries. And there’s a growing global movement to farm more and more of our seafood.
The Gulf is one of the LAST places in the world where there is still a major wild oyster harvest. Lately, though, that harvest…is in trouble. In this episode, we ask: What can the downfall and resurrection of the oyster tell us about a future of farming the ocean?
EPISODE CREDITS
This series is produced in partnership with the Food and Environment Reporting Network. This episode was hosted by Carlyle Calhoun and Boyce Upholt. Boyce also reported this episode. Editing by Jack Rodolico. Carlyle Calhoun is the executive producer. The episode was fact-checked by Garrett Hazelwood. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste, and our sound designer is Emily Jankowski.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sea Change is also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
Today, we bring you a story about oysters. And we're going to start with a guy named Rowan Jacobsen. He’s a food writer who's written not one, not two, but THREE books about oysters.
Back in the late 1980s, Rowan was in college in Sarasota, Florida. And in those days, he and his buddies developed a special tradition: whenever they got a little cash together, they’d buy up sacks of oysters. It felt like a way of connecting with their local place — sitting in the yard, shucking one raw oyster after another.
Rowan Jacobsen: You didn't even have to think about what your oysters cost. So you would just be drinking beer and it was like, you know, the backbeat for your beer.
This used to be the case on every coast. People everywhere would toss back cheap oysters.
Rowan Jacobsen: And then they killed the, you know, the golden goose and they fished out those oyster populations. So first the West Coast went down very quickly. Then the east coast went down. Like New York Harbor used to be full of oysters, ate 'em all. Chesapeake, we ate nearly all of them.
And as the oysters disappeared, people had to figure out some other way to get their oyster fix…
Rowan Jacobsen: They did what you do once you killed all your wild animals, they started farming them.
So farming oysters took off on the West Coast and the Northeast. And when you farm an oyster, it winds up looking and even tasting very different from a wild oyster.
Wild oysters grow in these big reefs—they’re all funky shapes because they attach to whatever they can, rocks, each other.
Farmed oysters … they’re more refined. Farmers grow them in bags or cages that they rotate, kind of tumbling them. And the farmers can place them where they want, like in super salty water where oyster reefs wouldn’t naturally form.
Rowan Jacobsen: They were getting these beautiful, perfectly shaped oysters that were super duper salty.
And this new kind of oyster became the norm in most places. Small. Pretty. Salty. And expensive.
But guess what? That shift to farmed oysters never happened in the Gulf. It didn’t need to. Oysters grow bigger, faster here in the warm, nutrient rich water. Fishermen could still go off shore and pull oysters right out of the ocean. And that shaped our food culture. It’s why Gulf menus feature things like oyster stews. Po’ boys overflowing with oysters.
And that abundance of wild oysters is why Rowan and his friends could afford them by the sack back in the 80s.
Rowan Jacobsen: What we didn't realize is that we were the only place on earth where you could do that.
The Gulf is one of the LAST places in the world where there is still a major wild oyster harvest.
Lately, though, that harvest … is in trouble. So now the Gulf is getting on board with farming oysters. It's a way to keep an important connection alive. Because, whether they're farmed or wild, the reason why those college oysters meant so much to Rowan — is because oysters offer us all a link to the ocean.
Rowan Jacobsen: I think the romantic feeling that a lot of people get and associate with oysters is because it's all about the sea. Oysters are just this transparent membrane between the sea and food.
THEME MUSIC
I'm Carlyle Calhoun, and you're listening to Sea Change. This is the second episode in a two-part series exploring the future of farming seafood in the Gulf. It’s a partnership with the nonprofit Food and Environment Reporting Network.
We know this: demand for seafood is soaring. We can’t sustainably meet that demand from wild-caught fisheries. And there’s a growing global movement to farm more and more of our seafood.
In this episode, we ask: What can the downfall and resurrection of the oyster tell us about a future of farming the ocean?
And to tell the story, I’m going to hand the mic over to reporter Boyce Upholt. Coming up, Boyce takes us down the bayou.
Part I
Boyce: Even thousands of years ago, Indigenous people on the Gulf ate a lot of oysters. We know this because they piled the empty shells up into massive mounds. One of these mounds, in Florida, stands over 20 feet tall and covers as much space as 3 or 4 city blocks. And these weren’t just oyster trash heaps.
Jason Pitre: Some acted as a shelter for storms, and then others were sacred mounds that contained artifacts and burials and stuff like that.
Boyce: That is Jason Pitre, a member of the United Houma Nation, which means his family history connects him to those sacred mounds of oyster shells.
I met with Jason this summer, on his family's land down in Golden Meadow, Louisiana, two hours south of New Orleans. It's along a little waterway known as Bayou Lafource. It's a beautiful place -- big sky, a lot of water, swishing marsh grass.
Jason Pitre: Being native on those bayous, you, you do it all. So you work the seasons, you trap in the winter, you oyster in the winter, you'll shrimp. You know, you just have to be well-rounded to, uh, survive.
Boyce: Jason is 41. He’s a big guy. His skin is tanned from all the sunshine he gets, he always wears a baseball cap. He’s gentle, soft-spoken.
[Add ambi tape]
He took me out to what he calls Bayou Rosa Oysters – it’s his oyster farm. Basically it’s just a dozen or so stiff black mesh bags, filled with oysters that float in a lagoon. While we are out there, he sorts through his oysters, tossing out the bad ones, putting the good ones back in the bags.
I’d come to talk to Jason because I think he's kind of unique among the oyster farmers planting flags throughout the Gulf. Some are young guys, coming out of the restaurant industry. Some are retirees, looking for continued income.
But Jason's oyster traditions … they’re deep. Jason grew up watching his grandfather harvest wild oysters. They'd go out together in a boat called a pirogue.
Jason Pitre: So you go in, like two or three feet of water and a little pirogue. And you'll pull up a paquet, which is what they called like a cluster of oysters. And so you would get your hatchet, break them up individually.
Boyce (tape): And then he would take those and sell 'em around town, sell 'em to restaurants? What happened to the oysters that he harvested?
Jason Pitre: He didn't do restaurants, you know, he would shuck oysters in his shed and, uh. Just very small scale, just very relaxing, easy life, never really stressed.
Boyce: Jason’s grandpa was named Antoine Dardar, but everyone called him Whitney. And … Whitney offers one particular portrait of the oyster culture on the Gulf. It's .. intimate with nature.
Which isn’t to say harvesting oysters was entirely a CHOICE for Whitney.
Jason Pitre: He grew up in a time of segregation where the Indian school they were allowed to go to only went to the seventh grade. So just with lack of educational opportunities, you know, a lot of our people turn to the fisheries.
Boyce (tape): And you make that almost sound right, like you're saying, part of it was this lack of educational opportunities, but I get the sense that he really liked what he did.
Jason Pitre: Yeah, he loved what he did. You know, he would say he, uh, he never worked a day in his life. But at the same time, he loved school. So, he would've went on and done something else, but he didn't have that opportunity.
Boyce: So Jason's grandfather built this life on the bayou, fishing along with the seasons. Wild oysters were a crucial part of his income. But through the years … the oysters were slowly declining.
And then came the BP Oil Spill, in 2010: a big, headline-grabbing disaster. It turned out to be a one-two punch. The oil itself was bad enough ... but then officials unleashed freshwater from the Mississippi River. Which helped push oil away from the shore... But oysters need saltwater. So a lot of oysters drowned.
The spill, the response – it all meant Jason’s grandfather had to stop harvesting oysters for a couple years.
Once the coast was finally recovering from the spill, and his grandfather was ready to try again, Jason went out with him in his boat. His grandfather’s knowledge of the coast was encyclopedic. He knew every twisting waterway. But on that day…
Jason Pitre: I noticed him scratch his head and he's like looking out the window and then he walks to the outside the boat, he looks out that window and then like the, just the, the look of confusion because, you know, like landmarks he had known were completely gone.
Boyce: There wasn't anything wrong with his memory. It was another big disaster facing this coast. Louisiana's marshes are sinking. The ocean is rising. So in just a few years, some little bayous where Jason's grandpa used to harvest oysters -- they’d become big, open waterways.
[music]
Louisiana’s coast is disappearing. And so seems to be a way of life that was so important to Jason’s grandfather, Whitney. Jason's parents made sure that, unlike his grandfather, Jason went to college. And he picked up on a DIFFERENT family tradition.
Jason Pitre: My great-grandfather was a traiteur, which is kind of like a Indian medicine man. I decided to be a nurse just to try to follow in that footstep.
Boyce: In his late 20s, Jason began to take short-term nursing jobs in California. He'd be out there for months at a time. And on one of those trips, oysters came back into his life – in a totally unexpected way.
Jason Pitre: I work night shift, so it's probably two or three in the morning. I'm exhausted fighting, sleep and charting at a computer, which is very boring work.
Boyce: In the middle of the night, Jason overhears some colleagues in the hospital say the word "oyster." He sticks his nose into that conversation. And he finds out they are talking about an oyster FARM. He's never heard of an oyster farm.
But Jason winds up being curious, and goes to visit this oyster farm in California.
Jason Pitre: It was just bags and cages and oysters that come out in singles and pretty smooth shell, not a cluster of funky shaped oysters.
Boyce: By the 2010s, when Jason visited this farm — oyster farming was firmly established in California , and pretty much everywhere along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Wild stocks on those coasts were so far gone that farming was the only way to keep restaurants supplied.
Back on the Gulf, though, wild oyster reefs had been surviving. Not thriving, but surviving. So there was little incentive to start oyster farms ... until that BP oil spill.
After visiting the farm in California, Jason did some Googling. He learned that Louisiana had recently passed legislation that was paving the way for oyster farms. So Jason now faced a choice: Should his family stick to the old ways, or embrace this new approach?
Jason Pitre: And so, uh, I was like, man, this, this could be a reality. So I was so excited to tell my grandpa
Boyce: Oyster farms don’t tend to be controversial. That’s because they’re really good, ecologically. They’re not quite as good as ACTUAL reefs, which can protect shorelines against erosion. But oysters are filter-feeders, so if they’re out there, even in cages – they make the water cleaner.
Despite that, Jason’s grandpa? He was skeptical. You can imagine … he was an old man with deep traditions.
Jason Pitre: You know, you've been doing something one way your whole life. Your ancestors have done it one way.
Boyce (tape): What, uh, what convinced him ultimately?
Jason Pitre: you know, I shot an email to Sea Grant at the time and then, I remember they put me in contact with Jules, and so you know, after hearing it from him, you know, my grandpa was all on board.
Boyce: Jules – that’s Jules Melancon. And he is a BIG DEAL when it comes to Gulf oysters. A legend. We meet him after the break.
[MIDROLL]
When Jules Melancon died in 2023, he received a pretty rare honor for anyone, let alone a fisherman: his obituary appeared in the New York Times. Jules' story captures the massive changes for oystermen that have swept across the Gulf.
Everyone always called Jules a bear of a man, and he was a little portly. He had a wild mess of grey hair. In almost every photo I’ve found, he’s wearing waders.
Obviously I couldn’t interview him, but I have a recording of Jules from an oral history taken in 2015 by Baylor University.
Takas (oral historian): What are some of the best parts being an oyster farmer,
Jules Melancon (2015 Baylor): uh, about being free, the peace and the tranquility.
Boyce: Oystering was a tradition that went back generations for Jules. But the Melancons weren’t shucking in sheds. It was a big business. Back in the 1920s, Jules’s great-grandfather had SEVEN boats, and employees who would go out and drag metal rakes across oyster reefs.
Every week, a steamship took thousands sacks of his oysters up to New Orleans. A day-long voyage each way.
Jules Melancon: They would load the whole boat down with oysters till they couldn't float hardly float no more.
Boyce: It’s a stunning image – but, also – that’s a LOT of oysters. This sounds to me like the overharvesting problem that doomed wild oyster reefs on other coastlines. But Louisiana seemed to be doing fine. Following in the family tradition, Jules got his start in the industry in the 1980s.
Jules Melancon: 1984 it was like a oyster boom. They had a lot of oysters back then. It was good for about 10 years. Then in the nineties, the late nineties, the business started decreasing.
Boyce: In these years, Jules noticed Louisiana’s reefs producing fewer oysters. And there were outside pressures, too: imported, canned oysters from Vietnam and Korea were cutting into the business. Then Hurricane Katrina destroyed some of Jules' reefs. And, a couple of years later, that apocalyptic BP oil spill.
Jules Melancon (2015 Baylor): We could smell chemicals at night. We'd wake up in the middle of the night and we had a, a eyes burning.
Boyce: And here’s where we see what makes Jules tick — what makes him different. All along, he’d been curious about those oyster farms that existed elsewhere. Just casual, he’d chat with fisheries scientists about it sometimes. Now, after the spill, his urgency jumped way up. So he turned to a friend who he thought might know something about oyster farming.
Jim Gossen: And he said, what do you know about this? I said, I really know nothing.
Boyce: This is Jim Gossen. He’s not a fisherman — just this strikingly jolly guy who always seems to have a big cheesy grin on his face.
But Jim was a good guy for Jules to turn to. Because Jim knew a lot about seafood, and seafood markets. His business was food DISTRIBUTION. Jim Gossen got his start buying seafood from Louisiana fishermen which he then sold to restaurants. When imports started flooding the U.S. market, Jim figured, let me sell those, too.
Jim Gossen: So we started selling all these different items. I was one of the first people to bring Norwegian salmon into Texas, I remember, and it was mostly going to farm raise products.
Boyce: By the early 2000s, Jim noticed some of his customers didn’t want wild Gulf oysters anymore. Fancy steakhouses in Houston -- they only wanted those pretty little east coast oysters which Jim had personally never been a fan of.
Jim Gossen: And I like a chew to the oyster. You know, but I'm not growing 'em for me, you know, I'm growing them for the public. But I said, you know, if they want red shoes, I'll bring my red light. If they want blue shoes, I'll bring my blue light, whatever they want.
Boyce: So Jim tried to help his wild oyster fishermen friends stay in the business.
Jim Gossen: I said, you handle every oyster on the boat. You, you put it in your hand, throw a pile of the prettiest ones and I'll pay you more money.
Boyce: In other words -- he told fishermen to pick out the wild Gulf oysters that LOOKED farmed. Apparently, the oystermen really didn't like this idea – Jim told me he accidentally raised hell at a meeting when he brought it up.
But then -- the oil spill. That's when Jim heard from his friend, the oysterman Jules Melancon. Jules couldn't find enough wild oysters in the Gulf to pay the cost to run a boat.
So Jim and Jules took a trip together. They visited an oyster farm in Alabama -- a place that had recently begun testing farming techniques, seeing if they'd work on the Gulf. And on the drive home...
Jim Gossen: Jules asked me, he said, Jimmy, can you sell 'em? I said, well, if you can grow 'em, I'll sell 'em.
Boyce: Jim invested half the money in Jules' oyster farm, which, in 2014, became the first licensed farm in the state of Louisiana.
Oyster farming is a LOT of work. And all those cages that hold the oysters are expensive. Jules found that he wasn’t making the big money that his family used to with the wild oysters.
Jules Melancon: My grandfather, he retired a millionaire from the oyster industry.
Boyce: But there were interesting upsides, too. He sold fewer oysters, but at a higher price, often straight to restaurants, instead of working through a middleman. And he’d label the oyster depending on where exactly they’d been grown on his farm. Oysters farmed elsewhere had long been branded in this way. You could get Prince Edward Islands. Or, Wellfleets, from Cape Cod. Now, Jules was selling Beauregard Islands, Champagnes, Queen Besses.
In the end, what mattered to Jules was — this looked to him like the only viable path to keep him out there, on the water. That foresight seemed to set him apart from other fishermen.
Jules Melancon: They don't see what I see. They see something coming back where I don't, and then I see more of them unemployed and not making money that then me, I'm making a little bit of money enough to get by, you know?
Boyce: The reason why the New York Times called Jules a pioneer – it’s because where Jules led, eventually, more and more people followed.
Like Whitney, the indigenous oysterman who had at first been skeptical about oyster farms.
Jason Pitre: And so my grandpa and I went to Jules's spot in Grand Isle, and then, uh, they had the nursery where you could see baby oysters. So, you know, after a former fisherman or a former oyster man that converted to this new method, you know, after hearing it from him, you know, my grandpa was all on board.
Boyce: By 2021, every state on the Gulf had implemented a law that legalized oyster farming. New farms seem to pop up every month. Still, though, farmers are a small minority: if you put together the acreage of all of the farms in the Gulf – you’d only get a tiny fraction of the wild reefs that are still harvested.
You’d still probably never suspect this slurping oysters down here like so many of us still do, but things are precarious for the wild oyster. A big flood in 2019 that drowned Mississippi’s oysters in freshwater. The next year, 2020, oysters in Florida’s Apalachicola Bay, had reached precariously low levels. The whole bay was shut to harvesting. In 2022, Texas temporarily closed all of its wild oyster beds.
We need to build more reefs, for conservation reasons. But if you’re after oysters to eat, these days, it’s a lot easier to start a farm. That doesn’t mean that they’re totally safe, though. Jason's farm was hit by Hurricane Ida in 2021, and then last year by Hurricane Francine.
Jason Pitre: It took away a lot of our baby oysters. But you know, with every storm that passes, you figure out, okay, this didn't work, this worked, this didn't work.
Jason’s oysters are not cheap. Your average beer drinker probably can’t afford whole sacks at a time. That high price is a challenge. Studies commissioned by the state of Louisiana suggest small farms, like Jason’s, might have trouble surviving. A lot of customers will still opt for those cheap, wild oysters – while they last.
Jason Pitre: I mean, there's an economic model that says, you know, you need to sell your oyster for this price if you have this many oysters in the water to be profitable. But that's like, so far down on the list of, uh, why we're here and why we exist.
Boyce: Of course Jason is in this to make some money... but he’s got other big motivations. He wants to stay connected to an ancestral tradition. And to stay connected to one ancestor in particular, his grandfather.
Jason Pitre: He was with me through the daunting permit process and so, uh, he put the first seed out, um, unfortunately he passed before we got in restaurants and. it's still his product that we put out.
Boyce (tape): What do you think he's thinking now, seeing what you've built?
Jason Pitre: I really don't know. so During these interviews, sometimes. I get caught up, it hits me, and then I just need a second
Boyce (tape): Yeah. Yeah. Take, take your, take your time.
Jason Pitre: I, uh. I lost my grandpa and my grandma and my dad like in three years. So I, like, sometimes it hits me and then like I just get, like, I just got to like, so, you know, I, I just hope he's proud, you know, 'cause, uh, his oysters are still making it to market and.
Boyce: Jason just trailed off there. But – I think that’s a good place to end.
When I look at a platter of wild, raw oysters, I think, here are WILD animals, that someone has pulled from the wild ocean. Like … that membrane between my plate and the sea feels thin.
Farming the ocean … it can seem so technological. So managed. Almost invasive.
But the oyster story complicates that farmed versus wild dichotomy.
Jason’s Bayou Rosa oysters … they may not be the Gulf oyster of yore — wild and funky. But they are Jason’s grandpa’s oysters. The process has changed – but the tradition continues. Jason is out there, with hands in the water.
