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The Harker School is a non-profit school in Silicon Valley that has earned international recognition for its top academics, quality teachers, and student achievements. Three of Harker’s star students set out to improve the ecology of San Francisco Bay. Tiffany Chang, Annmaria Antony, and Sawyer Lai became interested in oyster restoration after reading about oyster shell recycling on the East Coast. They quickly realized that a recycling oyster shells program has a lot of moving parts so the students reached out to the Wild Oyster Project for a possible partnership. Linda Hunter, Founder and Director, offered to give the girls a taste of what recycling shells would be like. On a Saturday afternoon, the students met Linda at Bay Natives Nursery in Hunters Point to help out. They were tasked with moving a week's worth of shell to the roof of a shopping container using shovels, empty buckets, a Radio Flyer Red wagon and a tall ladder.
Tiffany shared, "I think we kind of underestimated how many shells there were. Just because we had been thinking, 'Oh, if it's two restaurants, it will be about two buckets.' And then we went there, and it took us about an hour and a half to shovel them all." While the experience was eye-opening, this did not discourage them. The girls proceeded to cold email every seafood restaurant in their area. If oysters were on the menu, the restaurant would be hearing from them. Two restaurants from the Boiling Crab chain agreed to take the students on by donating oyster shells. The Ray of Sunshine Farm https://www.rayofsunshinefarm.com agreed to help them build a Chicken Lounge so that chickens could clean the shell and the farm desinated a spot for the shells to be cured for a few years.
Despite their eventual success, finding resources for a project can be challenging, especially as sixteen-year-old girls. They reflected that adults often do not take them seriously. Sawyer declared, "We're gonna be the ones who have to solve all these issues when we grow up." Instead, they decided to start solving now. As young environmental activists, they understand precisely how crucial protecting our planet is. The students agreed that partnering with the Wild Oyster Project is an opportunity to make a difference. "Oysters are really effective at reducing pollution and it's really great for the wildlife and biodiversity in an important estauary like San Francisco Bay." Tiffany expressed. “Oysters can filter 50 gallons of water a day and make the water cleaner, they provide habitat for all kinds of other marine life in their role as ecosysterm engineers and oyster reefs can protect the shoreline from flooding by acting as a barrier to rising tides casued by climate change.” Looking into the future, the plan is to see the program continued by other younger students and after several years, seeing a new, community built reef happen in the South Bay. A first for the South Bay and a noble endeavor for these determined and entrepreneural students.
The students still have a long way to go. But the Wild Oyster project is confident that these young women have what it takes to make a difference.
I was captivated to read Bren Smith’s book, Eat Like a Fish, My Adventures as a Fisherman turned Restorative Ocean Farmer. Bren and I met at a climate change conference at the Presidio in the Before Times, when brilliant and curious people still came together to exchange ideas and feed off each other’s creative energy, unfettered by Zoom screens. I was excited to learn more about how restorative ocean farming could replace the extractive practices that had reduced the fish in our ocean to unsustainable levels.
Bren’s book brought that excitement back. Especially in the face of portentous climate change, Bren introduces the world to a groundbreaking solution to the global climate crisis in a book that is autobiographic, as well as instructive and visionary and, at times, funny.
In Bren’s words:
“I am a restorative ocean farmer. It’s a trade both old and new. A job rooted in thousands of years of history, dating back to Roman times. I used to be a commercial fisherman, chasing your dinner on the high seas for a living, but now I farm twenty acres of saltwater, growing a mix of greens and shellfish.
I’ve paid my debt to the sea. I dropped out of high school to fish and spent too many nights in jail. My body is beat to hell. I crawl out of bed like a lobster most mornings. I’ve lost vision in half of my right eye from a chemical splash in Alaska. I’m an epileptic who can’t swim, and I’m allergic to shellfish.
But every shiver of pain has been worth it. It’s a meaningful life. I’m proud to spend my days helping feed my community, and if all goes well, I will die on my boat one day. Maybe a small obit in the town paper. Letting my friends know that I was taken by the ocean, that I died a proud farmer growing food underwater. That I wasn’t a tree hugger but spent my days listening to and learning from waves and weather. That I believed in building a world where we can all make a living on a living planet.”
Bren is such a great story teller that you find yourself enamored not just by his vision for a sustainable aquaculture future and his how-to manual of creating your own sustainable ocean farm but by his many adventures and misadventures on the high sea in the fishing towns and shoreline bars that are part of a fisherman’s life.
A tale of environmental renewal, Bren’s book is an essential guide to saving our oceans, feeding the world, and creating new jobs up and down the coasts.
If you would like to learn more, check out this film that Patagonia produced called The Ocean Solution
The Q&A afterward includes commentary from our friend Paul Greenberg, author of 4 Fish, regular contributor to the New York Times and ardent oyster aficionado.
Let’s think beyond the end of the fishing line. We know that oysters are one of the most sustainable ways to grow food because you don’t need to water or feed them but add several more such species, like mussels, and kelp and seaweed and you have a method of farming that can change food production both on land and in the sea, a farm that creates its own healthy ecosystem that is inviting to all kinds of life apart from what is being grown and harvested. It’s an idea whose time has come.
Linda Hunter, Founder & Director
Wild Oyster Project.
Find out more about Thimble Island Ocean Farm and GreenWave:
https://www.thimbleislandoceanfarm.com/
Vincent (left) and Louis (right) at Cafe Ohlone, image courtesy of Cafe Ohlone
Here at Wild Oyster Project, I often talk about how native Olympia oysters have been found in the Bay Area for thousands of years and were a staple of the Ohlone people. Oftentimes the history of oysters begins with the Ohlone and ends with the Gold Rush, misplacing the relationship between the indigenous peoples of the Bay Area and Olympia oysters as something that happened in the past. I had the good fortune to speak with Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, the cofounders of Cafe Ohlone and mak-’amham, about living Ohlone culture and the importance of eating where you live. I am very grateful to Vincent and Louis for taking the time to speak with me for the Wild Oyster Project.
- Casey Harper, Deputy Director
Casey: To start, can you tell me a little more about yourselves and about Cafe Ohlone?
Vincent: horše ṭuuxi. I am Vincent Medina and I’m Chochenyo Ohlone. It’s important to know there are many tribes collectively known as the Ohlone. Louis and I are both Ohlone but from different parts and different tribes. For example, I am from the Halkin area in the East Bay which runs from South Oakland to Hayward where we speak the Chochenyo language. Ohlone people are a multicultural, multilingual series of independent nations that are closely connected.
Louis: I'm Louis Trevino, cofounder of Cafe Ohlone with Vincent, and I'm Rumsen Ohlone. Our lands are in Monterey, in the area around Elkhorn Slough and Carmel Valley, and we speak Rumsen Ohlone.
Vincent: Cafe Ohlone was born out of mak-’amhamam, a cultural nonprofit we started in September 2017. mak-’amham means “our food” in the Chochenyo language. At that time, there was a groundswell in the revitalization of Ohlone language and culture and we wanted to see Ohlone food traditions become a part of that. Cafe Ohlone was opened in September 2018 and led food gathering trips, cooking classes, and served formal dinners. Cafe Ohlone is the public face of the community work we do behind the scenes, providing a place for Ohlone people to be seen and represented, especially for the approximately one thousand Ohlone living in the East Bay.
Casey: Speaking of Ohlone food traditions, what are the traditional ways of harvesting, preparing and eating oysters? Can oysters be found on your menu?
Vincent: We do have oysters on the menu which we get from Tomales Bay, we are very happy to be able to source oysters from an area so close. We look forward to having native Olympia oysters on the menu in the future. The Ohlone have always been stewards of the land, managing the landscape. An example of this would be the salt ponds that were originally constructed back in ancient times. Ohlone would collect shellfish in the area around salt ponds with digging sticks made from either wood (manzanita or oak) or deer bone to pry the oysters from the rocks and mud. They would be collected in burden baskets or trays and prepared a number of ways like being cooked in an underground earthen oven, or strung on a dogbane cord and smoked and then eaten with acorn bread. It was a very refined way of eating oysters and would be part of a grand feast eaten on top of a shellmound.
Casey: Shellmounds are found all through the Bay Area, can you talk about the importance of Shellmounds to Ohlone culture?
Vincent: A shellmound is a mortuary complex. When a person passed away, they were buried in the shellmound with shells like oyster, clam, olivella, and abalone carefully placed over them in a very ceremonious way. It was about returning to the earth, returning to the landscape, and it was a slow process performed over thousands of years. There is evidence people were in California forty thousand years ago. Shellmounds were so massive by the time Europeans arrived they used them as navigational landmarks.
Louis: There is an intact shellmound cut by a creek which over generations and thousands of years of Ohlone use, has grown and become covered in vegetation and earth, and over the same amount of time the creek has cut down while the Ohlone have built up, thus creating a canyon. If you were looking at this hill and canyon, you would think it’s a natural formation, but it is the work of Ohlone people over many many years. A shellmound is not in stark contrast with the surrounding landscape, it is part of it.
Vincent: In January 2020, before the pandemic had come to California, we had a shellmound feast at Cafe Ohlone. It was about teaching people what shellmounds are all about. Shellmounds were places where we could gather and be close to our ancestors, with every generation of our family. By making the same foods with the same ingredients - meals of finely prepared oysters, clams, sea greens, acorn bread and berries, we are eating and experiencing the same flavors they did and connecting to them through this incredible depth of time.
Casey: Oyster aficionados often talk about the "merroir" of oysters - how the flavor of oysters encapsulates the environment in which they're grown. The same species of oyster grown in Tomales Bay doesn’t taste the same as an oyster from Puget Sound. Can you talk about the importance of food reflecting the land where it is grown?
Vincent: All the foods we feature at Cafe Ohlone are indigenous to this specific part of California. California is a large place and we never wanted to say we’re making the “indigenous food of California” because that would be an overstatement. We wanted to respect this place specifically,with all of its abundance. There are microclimates from Tuyshtak (Mt Diablo), to the hills, and down to the shoreline creating all these different foods. The Ohlone have no word for famine, but we do have a word for abundance. There were always alternatives. If the acorns didn’t come in, there was the fruit of the buckeye tree.
Cafe Ohlone intentionally highlights pre-contact foods. Through deep conversations with our elders and going through family archives recorded in the 1920s, we’re taking a long step back and looking at what traditionally was here. There was a real tie with the suppression of our culture and the suppression of the landscape. We wanted to highlight that the menu, like the landscape, is seasonal and always changing. Right now is the time for acorns which will be very central to the menu. In the fall the mushrooms like chanterelles and oyster mushrooms start to come in and we have more game like smoked venison and fried duck. Winter is a time of being inside, being together, and telling stories, so we have a lot of heavy foods like hearty stews with indian potatoes, broth made with mussels and clams and seaweed fried in duck fat, and warm teas made with rosehips and sage. The spring has lots of fresh greens like Indian lettuce (claytonia) and in the summer you have berries - strawberries, thimbleberries, gooseberries etc with these sweet colorful juices . It’s a cycle that makes sense, in the fall you prepare for winter, after heavy winter eating you need to cleanse your body with springtime greens which then prepares you for energizing summer foods. That’s the sophistication of traditional eating.
Casey: I should have eaten before this interview, that sounds so delicious.
Louis: Pre-contact foods were given to our people at the time of our creation, given and taught to us and are very place specific. All these foods are deeply connected to the land and all those things that come to our land were selected from by the Ohlone, like oysters, so we would like to have an active role in seeing oysters restored.
Casey: At Wild Oyster Project we envision the future of San Francisco Bay as a hybrid landscape that serves people and wildlife. We can’t restore the bay to a pre-gold rush state and remove decades of pollution and industrialization, but it can still also be wild, with a resilient and robust bay ecosystem. Environmental restoration often invokes this idea of resetting the clock on a landscape but really it’s about finding the best way forward.
Vincent: Life is interconnected and we know how resilient plants and animals can be. One time we were picking up clams from Tomales Bay and unfortunately they were packed in this styrofoam container. While we were trying to figure out how to best get rid of the styrofoam, a Ceanothus moth landed on it and laid eggs. At that point we had no choice but to keep the styrofoam container because now these beautiful native moths were growing on it.
Casey: Yeah, we’ve seen oysters growing on shopping carts thrown into creek mouths and on big styrofoam blocks used as dock floats at marinas. Oysters are out there, nature is out there, it just needs a place to land.
Vincent: Europeans wrote back in the 1700s that when they first arrived to the East Bay, it looked like park land with these interconnecting boulevards between the oak trees that ran from the hills to the coast. Those boulevards were essentially used as highways and were black with the ash from controlled burns. Ohlone stewardship of the land was so specific to place and so in tune with the land, it wasn’t necessarily visible to outsiders. Controlled burns as an example, do not just remove overgrowth, but loosen and aerate the soil, and open up meadows, and are carefully planted afterwards. The abundance that Europeans observed was a result of careful planning and management and deep knowledge.
Casey: Cafe Ohlone is reopening in November at the new location on Berkeley campus. Since closing for the pandemic in March of 2020, what has that journey been like?
Vincent: Community work involves everything we do. Since the pandemic started we’ve done 70 weeks of online Zoom language classes. Every Friday Louis leads the Rumsen language class and Thursdays I lead the Chochenyo class. Throughout the pandemic we’ve been thinking a lot about different foods introduced throughout our history. We reached for comfort foods that made us feel good in a hard time and we thought about food our grandparents would make, like slow chilis from the mission/rancheria times which were adopted into culinary traditions and “Ohlone-ized” with native ingredients and flavors. For example, my family makes a Chili Colorado with venison, oyster mushrooms, and california bay, so the only thing not traditional is red chili. And Louis’ family makes Albondigas with venison, native greens, and meatballs made with amaranth seed and chanterelles. We’re very mindful of incorporating those dishes that were brought in from outside and turned into an Ohlone dish. It reinforces to the public that Ohlone people have been here every step of the way and it is a living culture with new things being adopted.
Casey: I've heard a lot about the brownies and can't wait to finally try one, do you have a favorite dish?
Louis: For me, it’s acorn bread. It’s about a six month process from the time of the acorn dropping to serving it. You have to grind it, cure it, leach it, and turn it into flour so fine it passes through the weave of a basket. You don’t do that if you don’t value that food. It requires a relationship with acorns, there is so much care and love there.
Vincent: Bay nut truffles are such a specific food to this area. The nuts are gathered from the Bay tree, the nut is shelled, it’s roasted, ground down for oil and hand shaped into truffles. It tastes like dark chocolate and espresso, it’s a big energy hit. It’s wrapped in a single piece of Indian lettuce with one dried strawberry on top. It’s one perfect complex bite.
Casey: What can you tell us about the new location?
Vincent: It’s a soft reopening in November with a grand reopening happening in January. It will be a much larger version of the original Cafe Ohlone, and it’s going to feel like walking into an Ohlone village - there will be baskets and murals on display, Ohlone language will be projected on the walls, crushed shells on the ground, and with live music performances. It will be a very, very beautiful space.
It was a pleasure speaking with Vincent and Louis about their work. It is evident they have put in countless hours talking to elders, researching, recreating, and innovating the sophisticated dishes they serve and strengthening their community. Their faces light up when describing the new Cafe Ohlone and I can’t wait to experience it myself.
Wild Oyster Project works to restore native oysters throughout the unceded ancestral homelands of the Ohlone peoples. Most of our work these days is done from home in San Francisco and Oakland, whose original inhabitants are the Ramaytush and Chochenyo Ohlone. At the Wild Oyster Project, we talk about oysters being part of a holistic approach to ecosystem restoration. We acknowledge we are guests in this land and that holistic approach includes centering indigenous voices who have always been and continue to be its stewards. We must embrace Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in how we care for our cities lands, waters, and all its people.
This Saturday is Coastal Cleanup Day, but for an Olympia oyster, every day is coastal cleanup day. Oysters, like other bivalves, are filter feeders. They suck in water over their gills hoovering up anything floating around. As an oyster species, Olympias are tiny but mighty. A full grown Olympia is about the size of a quarter and filters around three gallons of water a day, that is about 30 gallons of water filtration power you can fit in the palm of your hand.
One of the most common questions we receive is - if we successfully restore Olympia oyster populations to the bay, would it be safe to eat them? With our history of water quality that is a valid concern. A century of degradation and pollution have led us to look dubiously at anything harvested directly from our bays waters. But oysters are discerning eaters, looking specifically for phytoplankton aka algae to eat. Everything else sucked up but rejected as ‘not food’ is expelled by the oyster as ‘pseduofeces’. This is an important distinction, any inorganic particles and grit the oyster is not digesting are still removed from the water column and become part of the benthic environment, reducing the turbidity of the water. Turbidity is a measure of how cloudy the water is. High turbidity generally means low water quality. The clearer the water, the more sunlight can penetrate, allowing the growth of more beneficial aquatic plants, like sea grass to grow.
When oysters filter feed, they are also extracting nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus from the water. This is very important in places like San Francisco Bay where high concentrations of available nitrogen and phosphorus in the water from urban, industrial, and agricultural runoff can cause harmful and potentially toxic algal blooms in a process known as eutrophication. Toxic algal blooms as well as bacteria from untreated sewage can bioaccumulate into oyster tissues which is what makes them potentially unsafe to eat. We can do our part by preventing as much untreated runoff from flowing into the bay as possible, allowing oysters to do their job, and the more oysters we have in the water the better.
There are many factors that go into what constitutes good water quality and it can mean different things to different species. Improved water quality is just one benefit of a restored oyster reef that cascades into other benefits and improves conditions for other species that live in the bay to thrive. So while you may not eat an Olympia oyster harvested today, the work we do now to leads to a swimmable edible bay in our future.
We saw an incredible amount of rain in February and while we are happy to have it, what does all this freshwater mean for oysters? Oysters like brackish water with salinity levels around 25 ppt (for reference the ocean is around 35 ppt, and freshwater is 0 ppt). When it rains, a lot of that freshwater flows into the Bay, lowering salinity levels and stressing our Olys. After repeated serious rain events, the saltiness of the water is so diluted it causes an incredible stress to the oysters and could possibly lead to massive die offs. And in our urban paved environment, a lot of the freshwater comes from streets via storm drains that tie into our creeks and empty into the Bay without any treatment or filtering. carrying trash and pollutants.
Walker Creek flows into Tomales Bay
California received over 18 trillion gallons of water in February. However, that water doesn’t do us any good if it hits impermeable pavement, collects a bunch of cigarette butts, pesticides, and heavy metals, runs into a storm drain and then shoots out into bay waters. The more rainwater we can capture in gardens, allow to infiltrate permeable surfaces, and divert from storm drains is not only good for recharging our groundwater resources, it keeps our oysters less stressed.
A recent UCLA study has found our rainy season may become even more concentrated into a smaller period of the year then it already is, with fewer spring and autumn storms. Periods of extremely low bay salinity may become regular events that our oysters must contend with every winter.
Interestingly, studies have found Olympia oysters are locally adapted within the bay. An oyster from Richmond might have a better tolerance of lower salinity levels than an Oyster from Fremont. Relief also comes in the form of strong tides, “In February, Tomales Bay Oyster beds were inundated by over 17” of rain. Fortunately, we had nice high tides that month that replenished the salt water in the oyster beds” says Martin Seiler of Tomales Bay Oyster Company. The more healthy and rigorous Oly populations we have spread through the Bay, with high genetic variation and locally adapted tolerances, the better chance we have to keep a viable population of Olympias in the bay. By establishing oyster beds now and with better rainwater management, we can help Olys weather the storm.
References:
http://www.sfbaynerr.org/2017/02/08/how-is-all-the-rain-affecting-our-bay-this-winter/
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climate-future-ucla-study
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267294038_Variation_in_salinity_tolerance_of_Olympia_oysters_Implications_for_restoration_in_the_face_of_climate_change
Valentine’s Day is this Friday. And while you may or may not buy into pseudosecular holidays steeped in Roman bloodshed, if you’re looking for a place to take a date that has good vibes, good drinks, and good oysters, go to the Hobnob in Alameda. Scott is co owner of the Hobnob, along with wife and head chef, Amy. I sat down with Scott to talk about what makes Hobnob special.
The first thing that hits me is the sign. With a nostalgic retro flourish, a large metal sign cascades down the front of building with “Hobnob” in neon letters and a jaunty martini glass beside it. Scott tells me the sign was original to the previous bar Kelly’s. When the location was bought and turned into the Hobnob they preserved the sign but also transformed it, painstakingly replacing the letters.
Like the sign, the name itself is a little old fashioned. To “hobnob” is to associate familiarly, to cutloose in an informal setting, and Hobnob nails that feeling. The kind of place you can come for dinner, for brunch, or for just a drink. The kind of place you feel equally at ease with a group, with a date, or by yourself. The kind of place where the majority of people know Scott and Amy, it’s neighborly in the best sense of the word.
I gesture to the bookcase in the corner filled with board games, new and classic. The games encourage patrons to stay a while, it’s a nice feeling. Scott tells me Connect 4 is their most popular game right now and he’s considering a night for tabletop roleplaying games, rather than the usual trivia or karaoke nights.
Scott is an oyster man for sure, he loves them fresh, grilled, or even canned in the Christmas Eve oyster stew of his youth. He loves them gussied up with a mignonette sauce, sprinkled with lemon juice, dabbed with hot sauce, or in a raw unadulterated form. Hobnob oysters mostly come from Fanny Bay, a farm in Vancouver that produces an oyster with a beautifully fluted shell and a more mild flavor, a great oyster to start off with for the uninitiated. So if you find yourself in Alameda and are ready to take the plunge you should know oysters are half off on Wednesdays, so get your midweek mollusk on.
The Hobnob is a stalwart supporter of the Wild Oyster Project. Last year they donated a portion of all oyster sales for National Oyster Day on August 5th. For the past two years they have been donating shell from the shucked oysters they serve. I asked Scott how they came to be involved. Turns out it was one of our Wild Oyster volunteers who approached Hobnob about the Wild Oyster Project and got the ball rolling on a weekly shell collection. Every week we take that shell to Ploughshares Nursery on the other side of Alameda for it to cure. The first shell we collected from Hobnob is now two years old and soon it will go back into the waters surrounding Alameda as part of a new oyster reef.
Since opening its doors in 2007 the Hobnob has been part of the Alameda community and seen it grow and change. In helping to build reefs from recycled shells and restore Olympia oysters, the Hobnob is creating a welcome environment not just for the people of Alameda, but its native oysters too.
Wild Oyster Project has gone international! Last month we had the pleasure of being interviewed by the french television program - Invitation au Voyage (Invitation to Travel) a show about unknown stories in well known places. The film crew, consisting of dynamic duo Liza and Pierre, interviewed Wild Oyster Project and Hog Island Oyster Co. about the history and production of oysters in San Francisco. They were drawn here by the story of our famous oyster pirate turned oyster patrolman turned author, Jack London.
A foggy morning in Marshall.
Our interview took place at Hog Island’s farm in Marshall on the eastern edge of Tomales Bay. George, our host, explained how oysters were the perfect food in a time before refrigeration and speedy continental transit, and why oyster farming shifted to Tomales Bay from San Francisco Bay when the latter became too polluted in the early 1900s. After a tour of the farm, a lesson in proper shucking, and some oyster eating, of course, we had a chance to talk about how the dramatic decline of native Olympia oysters in the decades after the Gold Rush led to commercial oyster farming, imported Eastern oysters, and the privatization of a public resource leading people to so called “oyster piracy”. A hundred plus years ago, oysters were popular in ways we can hardly imagine - a daily foodstuff of the working and upper class alike. Demand was high, people wanted their oysters, and in Jack London’s time, they didn’t care if the oysters they bought at the dock might have fallen off the back of a boat, so to speak.
While this episode might be centered around oysters in Jack London’s time, it was clear the love and respect that farmers and environmentalists have for oysters today. An oyster is a wonderful thing, a nourishing protein that travels well in delectable bite sized repurposable packaging. Although it is very much an animal, farming oysters feels more like gardening. A baby oyster the size of a seed is planted and it then grows itself, filtering the water as it does so. Although we might not be able to grow oysters in the Bay for consumption anytime soon, our native Olympia oyster is an ecosystem engineer, a foundation on which we can build a Bay that is more wild, richer in species abundance and diversity and more accessible than it is now.
It’s exciting to know the story of San Francisco’s oyster will be seen overseas and we are so grateful to Liza, Pierre, and George for making it happen.
Casanova claimed to eat 50 oysters for breakfast every day and swore they were the reason for his boundless energy and libido.
Legend has it that Casanova, the famed 18th century lover, fueled up on raw oysters every morning to maintain his stamina. Casanova became best known for having seduced more than 100 women, which he audaciously wrote about in his memoir. But, are oysters really effective as aphrodisiacs? Maybe. Oysters contain high levels of zinc, a mineral important in production of testosterone, sperm production, and immune function. Oysters also contain large amounts of the amino acid called tyrosine, a nutrient that plays a part in the production of dopamine. Increased dopamine levels in the brain correlate to an increased libido. There is also a lot to be said for the placebo effect. If you love oysters and love eating oysters with someone you love, that may be all the aphrodisiac needed.
The Wild Oyster Project is a community of incredible individuals, businesses and organizations supporting oyster restoration, and we like to highlight the talented people who make our work possible. Chef Travis Spear is the Chef de Cuisine at Limewood Bar and Restaurant located inside the historic Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. Chef Travis and the Limewood team reached out to us in January about donating shell to Save Your Shucks and supporting our work.
Wild Oysters: You are originally from the East Coast and worked as a chef and worked with an Oyster Shell Recycling program out there - how did that come about? Did you learn of the shell recycling program through the restaurant.
Chef Travis: I was introduced to an oyster shell recycling program in a former role as Sous Chef, Bourbon Steak Michela Mina at Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts in Washington D.C. The program collected approximately 100 pounds of oyster shells a week – I was impressed!
Wild Oysters: When did you start working at the Claremont and what attracted you to move to the Bay Area?
Chef Travis: I started working at the Claremont Club & Spa, A Fairmont Hotel in June of 2018. When considering relocation, I was attracted to the natural beauty of the Bay Area. From endless outdoor adventures, year-round moderate weather (no snow!), to the diverse local communities – it quickly became a great place to call home. The Bay Area is recognized as a leading food destination in the U.S. and it’s truly an honor to be part of it.
Wild Oysters: After you started working at the Limewood you found out about our program and reached out to us, can you tell us how you found out about the Wild Oyster Project and why you decided to partner with us?
Chef Travis: Claremont Club & Spa is committed to making a difference in the community where our guests and colleagues live, work and play. We work diligently to minimize the impact our property has on the planet by focusing our efforts across three areas of priority— social, economic and environmental. In addition to launching a Green Team and Planet 21 Program, our initiatives continue to grow, to exceed boundaries, and to create new partnerships such as the Wild Oyster Project.
With sustainable hospitality as a core pillar of our business, it was a natural fit to support and collaborate with the Wild Oyster Project. I admire their mission to restore wild oyster populations in the San Francisco Bay and I look forward to growing our partnership.
Our signature dining outlet, Limewood Bar & Restaurant has partnered with the Wild Oyster Project to eliminate waste and recycle oyster shells. As the only hotel to partner with Wild Oyster Project, we are committed to supporting our local nonprofit organizations and working together to make a positive impact in the community.
Wild Oysters: What’s something you love about living in the Bay?
Chef Travis: I love the sense of community here. I love the fact that I can source food within a 30 miles. It’s a beautiful area to live in.
References
Blake, J. 2003. The Olympia oyster, a tasty and nearly extinct little morsel. January 29, 2003, Living. Seattle, WA: Seattle Times.
Blake, B. and A. Bradbury. 2013. Plan for Rebuilding Olympia Oyster (Ostrea lurida) Populations in Puget Sound with a Historical and Contemporary Overview. Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Baker, P. 1995. Review of ecology and fishery of the Olympia oyster, Ostrea lurida, with annotated bibliography. J. Shellfish Res. 14:501–518.
Conrad, C., Gobalet, K. W., Bruner, K., & Pastron, A. G. 2015. Hide, Tallow and Terrapin: Gold Rush-Era Zooarchaeology at Thompson’s Cove (CA-SFR-186H), San Francisco, California. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 19(3), 502-551.
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