Oysters galore – in France

Nicki Holmyard shares her impressions after her visit to France’s oyster heartland.

I love oysters, and really miss having oyster farmers for neighbours! In my local fishmongers, No 3 oysters are sold for £1.50 each, making them an expensive treat. In restaurants, they are even more expensive because someone else is doing the work of opening them. I recently forked out more than £40 for half a dozen with a glass of champagne, and whilst they were delicious, I couldn’t help thinking about the several years of nurturing, back-breaking bag turning and grading the oyster farmer had gone through to receive a fraction of the final selling price.

Brittany oyster trail

On a recent trip to France, I was able to buy a box of 24 oysters for less than €18 (£15.30) – which is less than half the price in the UK, and far more affordable!  On another occasion, I enjoyed three oysters and a glass of white wine for just €6 (£5.10).

However, the oyster industries on each side of the English Channel are vastly different in scale. The UK is very much the poor relation when it comes to shellfish aquaculture, yet with a positive political and regulatory environment, it could achieve far greater things.

Production in the EU was just under 98,000 tonnes in 2020, and France accounted for 80,796 tonnes of this. The UK, by comparison, produces around 3,000 tonnes per year.

Fresh oysters on beach

According to EUMOFA, the European Market Observatory for Fisheries and Aquaculture, French production was stable between 2011 and 2020, apart from a sharp decrease in 2015 due to significant mortalities.

France is the main intra-EU oyster exporter, selling 10,035 tonnes in 2020, worth more than €66.5 million (£56.5 million). It is also the main importer from its neighbours, bringing in 6,541 tonnes worth €36 million (£30.6 million) that year.

Nicki enjoying a glass of wine with oysters

To match its prowess in production, France boasts the largest apparent consumption, with consumers enjoying 76,000 tonnes of oysters in 2020. According to France AgriMer, the national body promoting seafood and agricultural products, home consumption of oysters in that year was 22,925 tonnes, leaving much to be enjoyed in restaurants and cafés. Christmas is the most popular time to eat oysters, and more are eaten in December than at any other time of the year.

Large-scale retail and outdoor markets accounted for 80% of the sales volume in 2020 and oyster producers travel for many hours to sell their product inland at local markets. I enjoyed chatting to several producers in the markets about the trials and tribulations of their industry.

Brittany oyster farm

Oyster production
Oyster spat in France may be produced in a hatchery or collected from the wild, where the larvae settle naturally on submerged chalked tiles or plastic discs threaded onto poles. Hatcheries allow for more control over the quality and characteristics of oyster spat and produce single seed, whereas wild spat is generally clumped together and needs to be separated before ongrowing in bag and trestle or floating systems.

The main ongrowing areas are Normandy, Brittany, Loire-Atlantique including the Vendée, Charente-Maritime, Arcachon and the Mediterranean.

The Arcachon Basin provides much of the natural spat used throughout the oyster farming regions.

Aficionados may enjoy oysters that have been fattened in claires (ponds) before sale. These are variously classed as fine de claire, spéciale de claire or spéciale pousse en claire, depending on the time spent in the water, which can be up to eight months.

Fine de claire verte oysters are fattened in ponds containing special green algae (Haslea ostrearia), which produces characteristic green gills. I enjoyed a plate of these in La Trinité a few weeks ago and watched as an English lady on the adjacent table carefully cut away all of the green parts. I tried to tell her that these were the tastiest bits, but she replied that the look of them had put her off!

Oyster bags, Belon

Marennes-Oléron oysters benefit from PGI (protected geographical indication) status, while Cancale oysters from Normandy are on the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The little town of Bélon in Brittany is still famous for its flat oysters, but producers there also grow plenty of cupped oysters.

To protect their reputation and also to avoid recent issues with mortalities, the oyster farmers of Marennes-Oléron decided this year to stop refining their oysters in the claires between 1 June and 31 August. The decision was motivated by global warming, which has been making the waters of the claires too hot in summer and has affected the quality of the oysters. To compensate farmers and to maintain interest from consumers, a new brand called “La Baigneuse” (the bather) was launched.

Oyster with cider

A bit of history
Wild oysters have been harvested in France since the Palaeolithic era, and shell mounds discovered by archaeologists, which evidence significant oyster consumption, date back several thousand years.

Between the 1st and 5th centuries, the Bélon flat oyster was harvested for transport to Rome, where it was known as “callibléphares”, which translates as “beautiful eyelids”. Historians have found no evidence that the flat oyster was cultivated during this time, though. It was not until the 17th century that oyster farming emerged in France.

Initially, oyster seed was collected from rocks or from natural beds, then raised in reservoirs in the salt marshes of the Atlantic coast. Later, specially constructed basins began to emerge in the Marennes-Oléron region.

During the 18th century, salt lost its monetary role in society, which freed up large areas of salt marsh along the Atlantic coast for oyster farming, which started to proliferate. However, the continued reliance on wild oyster seed led to devastation of the natural populations. By the 1850s, exploitation of oyster beds was restricted and in some areas, prohibited.

Plato once wrote: “Our need will be the real creator.” This has roughly been translated as the English saying, “necessity is the mother of invention”. And so it was in France, where the sudden unavailability of oyster seed led to the idea of collecting it on submerged stakes, and the resurrection of the industry.

Around the same time, people living in the Arcachon basin began to import Portuguese cupped oysters (Crassostrea angulata), and this species was found to grow far more rapidly than the flat oyster. So much so, that by the early 1900s, along the Atlantic coast, two-thirds of production had been turned over to Portuguese oysters.

Flat oysters went into decline around this time, and heavy losses pushed them to the brink of extinction. As a result, the Portuguese oyster was introduced to all areas, and made up 80% of production volume by the 1960s. The rise of this oyster was followed by a devastating fall in production the 1970s, when disease wiped out the entire population. The Japanese or Pacific oyster Magallana gigas (formerly Crassostrea gigas) was introduced to restart the French industry and is its mainstay to this day.