Say you find yourself in the awkward position of having more raw oysters than you can eat. Should you simply throw them out and let them dry to death, or should they somehow be put out of their misery first?
That was the question on Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen recently. A reader wrote in with a dilemma: “I realize that I didn’t have any problem shucking and swallowing them alive, but is it cruel to just throw the extra oysters away and let them dry to death?”
I’ll steer clear of debates over the soul of an oyster, but it seems uncertain as to whether oysters are capable of feeling pain, particularly after being doused with mignonette.
While the Apartment Therapy staff is busy researching the matter, readers are weighing in with their opinions.
Is letting them die of dehydration worse than letting them die in your stomach?
The oyster is going to die some day whether you eat it or not, minimizing suffering is the important thing…. Perhaps you could set up an aquarium and keep the survivors as pets and study how long they could live and maybe have one grow a pearl.
Wasting perfectly good food is more unethical than your touchy-feely dilemma. Good god, their death in the garbage couldn’t be any less horrid when they are drowning in your gastric juices.
But it seems there is an answer to this particular ethical conundrum. The wife of a former oyster farmer writes:
Once you’ve shucked an oyster, you basically kill it. They are alive in their shells, but when opened, they are killed. When you eat raw oysters, they are just that—raw, but not alive.
Whew, I’m glad we solved that one. I was beginning to worry about all of our souls.
Too many oysters? How could this be?
Even if we were to accept that this is possible, why not pickle them or freeze to use in oyster dressing or something like that? Throwing out an oyster is unimaginable to me, and it’s not that I care about how they die.
Seriously, this is a little too “let them eat cake” for me.
Oh come on, of course they’re still alive after the shell is opened (thrown in a plastic container with a quart of other oysters, well maybe no) – it’s just a very basic sort of alive, after all the only thing they can move is the muscles holding the shell together.
About throwing out oysters, I’d stick to worrying about variously ‘discarded’ humans dying.
I have to agree with andytee- there’s no such thing as too many oysters. There’s NEVER leftover oysters in my house, and even if there was , a hearty chower is in order. What bothers me about this post is ther waste of food. Too many, so throw it away? that’s not right.
see now this is the kinda fact finding missions that matter…seriously as a native new englanda (sic) I’ve always wondered when it’s raw vs. raw-alive. TQ!
In Suriname, the locals would pledge some strong rum to the Gronman (the Ground Man) when camping. Is suggest you pour some wodka on the condemned oyster, it will finally dehydrate in complete bliss.
(Then again, I ‘ve never met a forlorn oyster without a roding predator in the neighbourhood)
Tea, thanks for picking up my post. I thought this was a great “fact finding mission” to explore . . .I heard from a lot of people on this one.
We had a lot of readers feeling the pain of those oysters.
A shucked oyster stays alive if it is not seriously injured in the process. The next time you buy shucked oysters, look at the use-by date. Most dead seafood is viable on the store shelf for 3-4 days. Shucked and packaged oysters are good for more than a week. The damaged/dead ones are sold as stewing oysters and have a shorter shelf-life. Live food on the grocery store shelf provides an uncommon experience for most people. Nothing compare to the what the oyster is experiencing – even considering its simple nervous system. It goes from a solitary existence in total darkness to skin-on-skin with other oysters under florescent lights. Back to the original question. Steam the surplus oysters, shell and refrigerate.Use them within a few days by adding them to your favorite breakfast egg scramble to make a Hang Town Fry.