In Europe, most persons travel third class on the railways because they cannot afford first or second. In this country, nearly everybody can afford to travel first class. Americans are always bound to have the best of everything—if they know how to get it. Only in the gastronomic world are they—with the exception of the Jews—traveling third class—eating third-rate poultry prepared by third-rate cooks. This cannot last. We can afford the best. Let us have it.
SPOILING THE AMERICAN OYSTER.
Nowhere in the world are oysters more abundant than in America. Nowhere are they cheaper or better. As a rule, too, we cook them well, in various styles; but in the opinion of most epicures a cooked oyster is an oyster spoiled. Its food value in any case, raw or cooked, is very small, and it is chiefly as a relish that those who know how to eat value it. But for years the public has been allowing the men who market oysters to eliminate the very elements which give them relish by soaking them in fresh water, which makes them bloated, blonde, and tasteless.
The dealers declare that many consumers demand them that way; floating makes them bigger. There are such consumers; they sacrifice quality for quantity; they know not that usually the best oysters by far are the small brunettes straight from the deep sea; and they further demonstrate their gastronomic obtuseness by smothering their oysters under several strong condiments, which in themselves would destroy their delicate, natural Flavor.
In some of our States the government has come to the rescue of the epicure—who is in despair at this wholesale denaturing of his favorite delicacy—by enacting laws against the soaking of oysters because few of the streams in which this is done are free from typhoid and other deadly germs; but many of us do not feel sure that the health boards (because of indolence or "graft") exercise the necessary supervision, and therefore we deprive ourselves of the cheap luxury which Europeans have most reason to envy us. At banquets, where everybody used to eat oysters on the half-shell, it is noticeable how many plates the waiters remove that have not been touched.
Having thus summed up the indictment, let us consider a few of the more important details.
The London "Lancet" of April 22, 1911, had an editorial article on Shell Fish and Disease in which it pointed out that while from the nature of the case the testimony is usually of a very circumstantial kind, "which only becomes convincing in its cumulative aspects," there are instances on record like the outbreaks following certain banquets in Southampton and Portsmouth which admitted of no doubt as to the source of the disease.
Dr. H. T. Bulstrode made a comprehensive report upon enteric fever and gastro-enteritis in England to the Local Government Board of London, in 1906, in which he showed by means of maps how many of the mussel, oyster, and cockle beds were exposed to contamination, his revelations being, as the "Lancet" remarks, "decidedly disquieting." Even in cases where the shell-fish were collected from locations relatively remote from contamination by sewage they were likely to be "brought back and cleansed on shore much too near the mouths of sewers." England is thus in the same predicament as the United States, but that is small comfort for us.
In an address before the New York Academy of Sciences delivered by Dr. George A. Soper, President of the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission and reported in the "Times" of March 14, 1911, it was pointed out that there are over 500 sewer outlets discharging into the rivers and harbor of New York each day a volume of sewage that would fill the channel of the East River from the Brooklyn Bridge to a distance of fifteen miles. "New York gets many of its oysters from Jamaica Bay—about a million bushels a year. The water at this section is heavily polluted, and to this can no doubt be traced a great part of the typhoid that breaks out in this city. The Board of Health has found that 15 per cent. of all typhoid is due to the eating of polluted shell fish."
James L. Kellogg, professor of biology in Williams College, in his admirable book on Shell Fish Industries[4] sums up the results of his thorough study of this subject in a chapter on Bivalves in Relation to Disease. It may be stated as a fact, he says, that "epidemics are sometimes caused by eating uncooked oysters. Several times they have been traced directly to that source. The evidence collected on that point in this country and abroad is conclusive."