Fieldwork: Philine Travels North American Oyster Shorelines

Philine spent two months travelling the US and Mexico to follow the oyster, past and present. From archives to farms and from east to west, she encountered vastly different ecosystems and complex networks of trade. In Baltimore, the former Chesapeake canning capital, the oyster is but a ghost of an industry past, while in South Carolina wild oysters are so abundant that they are commercially harvested. On the West Coast, different species vie for attention: the native “Olympia” population struggles while the introduced Pacific oyster rules both farms and plates. If one follows the oyster, other mollusks are not far. In Mexico, almejas chocolatas and callo de hacha exist in a complex relationship to native and non-native oyster species in a fraught industry that seeks to establish a delicate balance between wild and farmed.