If 'the world is our oyster' why are they so expensive? Shakespeare's formulation, that a poor man denied money may open the world like an oyster instead, takes on a very different meaning when the cheap food of the poor becomes the delicacy of the rich. Perhaps the shifting fortunes of the oyster are simply the most obvious example of a culinary and cultural refinement which has seen the pots of the many emptied on to the plates of the few. The crumbs from the master's table, 'authentic' and 'honest', have been plucked from the mouths of the poor who have been sold instead a pale imitation of the original loaf.
Oysters comfortably adorn the plates of the highest haute cusine and the stalls of the saltiest salt-of-the earth artisans, yet it is no secret that they were also once plentiful fare for the English poor. Originally popular with England's Roman invaders who set slaves to work collecting the delicacy from the shores of the English Channel, these native delicacies were transported as far as the empire's capital. After the Romans left oysters fell out of favour but were popular again as early as the 8th Century and by the 1400's were consumed in great numbers by both the rich and poor. For the less well-off they would appear on 'fish days', during which no meat was eaten and which fell as often as Wednesday, Friday and Saturday in order to bolster both the fishing industry and the number of seafaring men available to the royal navy.
Up until the 19th Century oysters were consumed by the barrel by those who would never taste a fillet, chop or cutlet. Eaten raw, cooked or pickled, oysters were a far cry from the symbol of fine dining they have become. As cheap protein for the poor they were used as stuffing or padding in dishes whose meat content was financially constrained. Perhaps most famously the oysters in steak and oyster pies were present to balance the lack of expensive steak and they even had theirs own drink in 'oyster' stout. A cheap drink to be served alongside a cheap food and their ubiquity had Charles Dicken's Sam Weller state in 'Pickwick Papers' “poverty and oysters always seem to go together”. However in time overfishing and a polluted habitat slowly raised the price of the humble oyster, pushing them beyond the reach of the common people and elevating them to the status we know today.
This transition of the oyster from sustenance to sublime is not unusual in the lineage of culinary refinement. Foods which traditionally had mass appeal carry with them a history which contains cultural and symbolic resonance, all of which adds up to a lucrative 'authenticity'. Nevertheless this refinement also contradicts a different tenet of the superiority of the food of the rich: Principally that a refined gastronomy, whether it be the most baroque haute cuisine, intricate molecular gastronomy or mud encrusted slow food is created by artists and artisans. These movements creative a definitive break between the production and consumption of food, one in which the producers' act is elevated to an art form where formal experimentation, deconstruction and refinement eclipses the lowly alimentary worries of the poor. Moreover this culture reserves for itself every creative and cultural facet of cookery, with the food of the majority relegated to mimicry or simply subsistence.
The problem with oysters is that in their elevation nothing has changed. At a stretch it might be argued that various dressings and preparations are formal concerns, yet the truth is that today oysters are consumed almost exclusively raw. The hedonistic pleasure indulged in an oyster bar cannot be too different from that experienced two centuries ago in a dock side pub. The conclusion to be drawn is that the formal properties which can only be extracted from the oyster's shell by a refined cooking are not a sea-saltiness, a moist suppleness or a giving bite but scarcity and monetary value. Form over function, yes,but let's not fool ourselves over which formal aspects are truly prized.
This conclusion in turn questions another assumption of the food culture of the rich, that refined cooking caters to a refined palate. The inverse of this proposition sees the poor staunchly opposing almost anything other than fat saturated carbohydrates, processed meat and the occasional boiled vegetable, yet once again the oyster's unaltered transition makes this rather hard to swallow. Oysters along with whelks, cockles and winkles not to mention wild game, offal and all manner of cheap cuts of meat and fish were once staples of a working class diet, yet today are to be found almost exclusively on the menus of a higher class of restaurant. Not all of the these foods have undergone the rapid shift in availability and price of the oyster, some are still relatively cheap, however their disappearance from the tables of the poor suggests an altogether different shift. The post war move in one or two generations to a far more homogenised food culture has it's roots in social imitation, the ever increasing marketisation of every aspect of the food chain and a steady decline in real wages. Yet underpinning this homogenisation is an active process of cultural cleansing.
As is clear the long history of oyster fishing in England, protected by an act of parliament which set up the Whitstable Oyster Fisheries Company in 1897, is one of the main constituents of the contemporary understanding of, and desire for, oysters. However this cultural aura is only safe as part of an isolated, historicised practice and not as a living culture: It is served at a premium with the trappings of an imagined mid 19th century, like the oysters themselves far from the polutants of the modern world. This authenticity is heightened by the most minimal preparation, which supposedly gets the most from the finest ingredients and those who can afford it get the sublime ecstasy of an unmediated experience.
In contrast the food of the poor is marked by the highest possible mediation - it is processed. During the transformation from raw ingredients to finished product processed food will go through innumerable stages and accommodate multiple additives> Nevertheless the popularity of molecular gastronomy suggests this is not a problem per se. The real problem lies in the fact that this processed food is both relatively bland, leaving aside flavour enhancers, incredibly unhealthy and nullifies any food culture outside of that of the rich. With working class culinary history isolated from its progenitors and sold in vitro to the highest bidder, processed food deals a double blow to the emergence of a new culture. Firstly, along with the time demands and poor remuneration of work it relegates cooking to a worthless chore. Secondly in opposition to the food of the rich it completely dehistoricises food. With ingredients which are unrecognisable or hidden processed food exists only from the moment it is purchased. Shorn of the creative act of cooking or the shared communality of an existing culinary culture, processed food is the model simulacrum, an object without an original. It would be a crime to process an oyster and so the poor will never have them.
What is so dangerous about a working class food culture? Clearly there's money to be made from controlling what people eat and the totalising control of the food chain that this entails but that's not all. An engagement with cooking would be one part of a larger culture which might engender solidarity, dignity and shared contemporary values, rather than those forged in a disarming extraordinarily rose-tinted nostalgia. The destruction and suppression of this culture therefore serves a twofold cause: To protect imposed and static symbolic properties of food from the pollution of the poor and to deny their culture any utilisation of the cultural resonances which food might have. Here, once again, oysters tell an illuminating story.
On the 8th December 1811 Timothy and Celia Marr, their 3 month old son and James Gowan, an apprentice, were brutally murdered in their home in Whitechapel, a crime which became known as the Ratcliffe Highway Murders. It was so vicious that it played a large part in prompting the formation of an organised police force in Britain, yet a further member of the house was spared her life as she had gone out to buy oysters. This kind of extreme violence was far from uncommon in poverty stricken boroughs but it was its association with England's prized mollusc, made so readily by Dickens, which meant the link between oysters and the poor must be severed. Today, in this context it is only too clear why 'Oyster Card' fares for London public transport were raised immediately on the inauguration of a conservative mayor. For the poor to have oysters they must be worth less, but if the poor actually have them they'll be worthless.
Likewise,whether grounded in the image of the goddess Aphrodite emerging from the sea on a giant oyster shell or in the visual similarity to female sexual organs the oyster has long been considered an aphrodisiac. For those in power however the problem of the poor is not their life of drudgery but their over-enjoyment and a lack of responsibility. This is apparently most visible in a feckless sexual hedonism and unintended procreation, so to allow the poor access to a noted aphrodisiac would be reckless at best. Clearly the unaffordability of oysters is not down to people being too poor to afford them but due to there being too many poor people. How can a food so enjoyable, so sublime, be the food of a class which clearly already has such an excess of enjoyment.
Much left-political discourse about food is focused on ethics whilst aesthetics and culture are the monopoly of bourgeois discussions over 'authentic' slow food minutiae. The ethical debate often focuses on animal welfare and many consider oysters one of the most ethical to eat due to their lack of a central nervous system. Nevertheless, oysters are eaten alive. What does it mean to eat something alive and what would it mean to speak politically about the aesthetics of a working class food culture? We could start by thinking about what happens when a culture is eaten alive. Much is made of Marx's analogy of the vampiric nature of capitalism but it seems especially appropriate here. The food of the poor which ,like an oyster, once filtered the environment around it now, like an oyster, lies static on ice, ready to be swallowed whole, again and again. Perhaps it's time to bite back.
