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With the Oysters in Summer
By Marie Coolidge Rask
OYSTERS— what becomes of them when we do not eat them? As a matter of fact, there is no hard and fast reason why we should not eat them all the year around. The summer abstinence is really only a matter of custom. Dame fashion decrees what people shall wear, and her sister, called custonij makes it manifest what we shall eat.
If our tables were governed by any standard" modes of procedure instead of by cook books, we would read that oysters are not eaten in any month lacking the letter "K," simply because no precedent to that effect has been established. Authorities tell us, however, that oysters are very delectable at any time, tho somewhat lean in the summer season and lacking the full flavor that they possess later in the year.
According to precedent, therefore, the oyster has now gone into retirement until September. This does not imply that it ceases to be of interest. Instead, it becomes the very center of attention on the part of the sea farmer. It is he who attends to the colonization of the oyster. For cold, financial reasons he wishes it to fulfil the scriptural injunction to increase and multiply in sufficient numbers for the great shipments of the early autumn.
To be as dumb as an oyster does not mean that the individual so addressed is stupid. The oyster is not half so stupid as he looks. It is quite true, he may never learn to answer to his name as a family pet, but his rule of silence permits the oyster system of community life to be enforced with a peace and contentment that creatures
of a higher sphere of being strive vainly to imitate.
The sea farmer knows well the history and habits of the oyster family. He is especially interested in the frisky, young things that swim freely thru the water before they cluster themselves for life by adhering to the bowl of a clay pipe, broken pottery or .ipon the shells of their ancestors. The oysterman feeds and nourishes the young oysters because he knows, better than anyone else, that unless artificial culture is given, the oyster race must yield to extermination thru wanton destruction, just as surely as did the buffalo and the passenger pigeon.
All fishes, oysters, clams and other animals propagating in natural state, rapidly decrease when used for food because the growth of the young is left largely to chance. When the eulturist intervenes and literally arranges an oyster nursery the result is a rapid increase in the number that survive.
At the present time, nearly every natural oyster bed on the coast of the Atlantic has been destroyed. The culture of the native oyster commenced.
the
BOAT OX WHICH THE MOTION PICTURES WERE TAKEN.
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