Raw Oysters to Be Treated for Bacteria
November 8, 2009
Jacksonville
by Roger Bull
Before hunting, there was gathering.
Like an orange hanging on the tree, a raw oyster is one of the most basic of foods. Reach down and pull it out of the water, open it and eat it. OK, maybe add a little lemon or hot sauce.
But it may soon not be that simple. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has decided that starting in 2011, raw oysters coming out of the Gulf of Mexico during warm-weather months must be treated before they can be sold to consumers.
They call it post-harvest-processing (PHP for short) and there are several methods – freezing, pressure, radiation – to kill vibrio vulnificus, a bacteria that occurs naturally in warm coastal waters and is more prevalent in the summer. But it can be fatal to people with liver disease, diabetes or other problems.
The bacteria causes about 30 people a year to get sick from eating raw gulf oysters and half of those die. And it’s the reason that warnings about eating raw seafood are printed on menus everywhere.
The FDA’s plan would apply only to oysters still in the shell because while shucked oysters sold in pints and gallons are still raw, it’s assumed they’ll be cooked before eaten. The FDA hasn’t been specific about what it considers warm-weather months, but discussions so far have indicated it would start in April or May and end in October.
That would loosely correspond to the old, unofficial tenet to eat oysters only in months with an “R.” And though oyster sales are better in cool months, 40 percent of oysters harvested in the gulf are during warm months.
The FDA would not talk to the Times-Union despite repeated requests, but the move has already drawn a storm of protest. Charles Bronson, Florida commissioner of agriculture, wrote a letter to the FDA on Wednesday objecting. On Thursday, Sens. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., Mary Landrieu, D-La., and David Vitter, R-La., announced a bill to stop the FDA’s plan.
But nowhere is the outrage greater than in Franklin County, the small Panhandle county where 90 percent of the state’s oysters are brought up by hand and tong from the bottom of Apalachicola Bay. More than 20 percent of the county’s 11,200 population work either in harvesting, shucking or shipping oysters.
“We’re all upset about it,” said Beverly Hewitt, owner of the Apalachicola Seafood Grill, a gathering spot at the center of the historic small town. “We had a emergency county commission meeting. This is going to kill Apalachicola.”
Tommy Ward, who runs Buddy Ward and Sons Seafood, the company his father started in Apalachicola in 1957, said it would cost him about $1 million to set up a PHP plant.
“We have to shut down in the summer,” he said. “It’d wipe out the whole county.”
Besides not being able to afford $1 million, Ward said that treated oysters simply don’t sell very well.
“They’re on the market now,” he said. “But the customers don’t accept them.”
Ahead of the curve
Grady Leavins, who’s been in the oyster business in Apalachicola for 38 years, is one of the few seafood dealers in the state who already treats oysters. His PHP plant freezes them at minus 130 degrees with liquid nitrogen and sells them on the half shell.
Sales are good, he said, and increasing. But they’re still only 5 to 7 percent of his total oyster sales, which are running about 400,000 pounds a week right now and will go up to 600,000 in another month.
Leavins sees himself as ahead of the curve.
“I knew that it was the thing that was going to be done,” he said. “Are we making money? Yes. Have we gotten our investment back? I don’t know, but anytime you do something like this, it’s a long-term thing.”
The treated oysters cost 2? to 3 times more than untreated and are sold to oyster bars and restaurants.
“They’re for the people who want a traditional oyster,” he said, “but have a compromised immune system.”
And that’s one of the things that bothers those in the oyster business the most: People should know when they should avoid the oysters.
“The biggest thing is cirrhosis of the liver from alcoholism,” Leavins said. “I’m a high-risk person; I’m a diabetic. So I don’t eat them in the summer.”
