Salinity Presents: Rowan Jacobsen, Part 1

I'd love to hear what inspired that book and how you got interested in oysters.

Yeah, so for me, it actually started with a previous book I wrote called The Geography of Oysters, which I started thinking about.

It was kind of like the early 2000s, and I was writing and editing for like a foodie magazine called The Art of Eating that really the focus was what makes great food great.

What are the factors that make this thing what it is? So terroir, basically, the term that means the taste of place and used to get applied to wine, and now it gets applied to lots of different things.

And so as I was eating oysters in the early 2000s, I was realizing that terroir was really important for them.

And this is now common news in the oyster industry, but it wasn't really talked about much at the time.

But they really depend on their flavor for the water that they grow in, as well as their own characteristics, their own genetic characteristics.

So the big three factors in the flavor of an oyster are what kind of oyster it is, where it grows, and how it's grown.

There are different things you can do to sort of affect that.

So I thought that was really interesting.

So I started exploring the differences in oysters all around the country, because there are oysters growing in so many different places.

And I wrote about that in the book.

But then while working on that, I got more interested and learned a lot more about oysters' role in the ecosystem, which is stuff that I know you know very well.

But they are a really important linchpin because they build what is essentially structure in the water.

They filter the water, so they make the water cleaner.

But they also build structure, which becomes kind of like the condominiums for the little tiny things of the intertidal zone who like to live in those nooks and crannies.

So they're very important for the health of that whole ecosystem.

So then as I was thinking about that, I was getting to know some of the folks at the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, especially Betsy Peabody.

And they were very interested in the Olympia oyster, your favorite.

The Olympia is native only to the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. And it's a very tiny little oyster, but it is a key part of that whole Pacific Northwest ecosystem.

Let's not exclude Northern California.

They might get upset if we leave them out of that.

There are definitely Olympias down in Northern California.

I've actually seen them down in Tomales Bay.

They're doing really cool restoration work right now.