Sources!
* Oysters of Ireland: Merroir (Part 1 of 3)
* Ireland Oysters exports by country | 2022 | DataA French family dynasty reinvents the oyster - The New York Times
* Ostra Regal Oyster - Oysterater
* Ireland forms collective oyster brand for marketing, promotional purposes | SeafoodSource
* Chinese counterfeiters taking advantage of French dominance in oyster branding | SeafoodSource
* Get shucking! September marks the start of Oyster season in Ireland!
Show Transcript!This is Mariculture Minute. Let’s talk about French Oysters. Sounds classy, right? Nothing more fancy than a plump shellfish along the Champs-Élysées. Well actually, there’s a chance that French Oyster might have a wee bit of an Irish brogue. That’s because Ireland exports a lot of its oysters to France–72% in 2021 according to the World Bank. And while some of these oysters go straight to happy french consumers. A chunk of these Irish oysters go to French Oyster farms where they grow another year or two, in claires or shallow ponds, and are sold as products of France.
This is how it works. Oysters are animals. and they take some time to grow. They start, kind of like how we do–as fertilized eggs, at this point the oysters are microscopic but they slowly get bigger as they go through various stages, the trocophore, the veliger, the pediveliger with its cute little foot, and then finally the oyster grows to something the size of a grain of sand–the spat, from the spat they grow maybe an inch per year, getting their food by filtering nutrients from the water. The oyster’s environment over these months and years can affect their size, shell and even taste.
The oysters eventually build up their muscle and shell to the size of ones we eat–around 3 and half to 4 and a half inches. But It turns out Ireland is a good place to grow baby oysters with its cooler waters. In the past, France has had an issue with young oysters dying from a warm winter with heavy rains.
So French Oyster producers like Gillardeau buy 1-2 inch sized mini-oysters from Ireland and grow them some more, maybe a year or two, in France. In fact, a business in China got in hotwater for skipping the French part and sold Irish oysters fully grown in Ireland as Gillardeau. They even faked Gillardeau’s laser etched branding on the oysters.
For Mariculture Minute, I’m Jeremiah Murphy.
