Oyster shucking ground to near-halt

Natalie Gerdes' family owns Uptown New Orleans’ Casamento restaurant, which is famous for oysters and tile decor. The restaurant switched to takeout when the coronavirus stay-at-home order began in mid-March. Business is down 75 percent, she said. "Some days are a struggle." Few people are ordering raw or chargrilled oysters. Those who do are mostly regulars, Gerdes said. More than almost any other food, oysters tend to be consumed in restaurants. It also means that oyster farmers are struggling mightily. Most oyster farmers lease areas of the sea floor from the state. Their crop is sold to processors, who sell to distributors, who sell to restaurants. When the restaurant industry came to a halt, processors stopped buying. "Demand is down like 99 percent," said Mitch Jurisich, chairman of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force. In a normal year, about 5,000 sacks would be sold at the dock in Empire, La., weekly. Only about 500 sacks/week are being sold there now. Unlike most Louisiana oyster farmers, Boris Guerrero doesn't dredge up oysters. He manages Grand Isle Sea Farms, which sells specialty oysters grown in floating cages, directly to restaurants. Grand Isle Sea Farms has had an online business selling oysters directly to consumers. Customers are more willing now to try shucking at home, and to share online photos doing it, he said. Direct sales have not made up for the sales lost from restaurants. The Gulf Coast produces more oysters than anywhere else in the U.S., but production has been down between 50-to-85 percent from historic levels before the pandemic, according to a 2018 report by The Nature Conservancy. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill alone wiped out between 4-and-8.3 billion adult sub-tidal oysters in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2018, Louisiana was the only Gulf state producing as many oysters as before the oil spill. But recent flooding in the Mississippi River basin has further dented that progress. (Source: NOLA.com 05/11/20) https://www.nola.com/news/coronavirus/article_0610382a-8b1a-11ea-858c-f763d8784cbc.html.