You have to make a decision, there can be no such thing as both: love or disgust, heaven or hell, lust or sorrow.
The oyster leaves us no other choice, which is devoured or spurned, eaten by the dozen or never in life, which divides minds and tastes more radically than probably anything else eatable and is otherwise a miracle of contradictions.
Jakob Strobel and Serra
deputy head of the feature section.
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For centuries it was the favorite food of emperors and kings and at the same time saved millions of poor devils from starvation.
It's one of the healthiest foods out there and can ruin a seasoned person's health in minutes if it's not healthy itself.
Hailed as the most reliable aphrodisiac, she leads even the dullest love life.
She has such a peaceful disposition that she will not harm an alga, yet she is responsible for one of the most brutal campaigns of conquest and displacement in the animal kingdom.
How much poorer the world would be without this fantastically ambivalent creature!
Favorite Food of the Devourer of Women
The oyster has been a delicacy of the highest classes since ancient times. The daily record of the Roman Emperor Vitellius is said to have been four hundred specimens. It is known that his colleague Trajan, chilled in ice and snow, had the shellfish sent to him during a campaign as far as Persia. Pliny the Elder's oyster craving is also historically documented. Louis XIV, on the other hand, is said to have strengthened his manhood before the wedding night with Maria Teresa of Spain thanks to hundreds of oysters. Casanova boasted about eating forty oysters a day so as not to disappoint the ladies.
Fortunately, the two nobles did not know that the oyster itself is anything but a paragon of virility, but a hermaphrodite that can change its sex as needed. And neither the sun king nor the devourer of women took offense at the fact that oysters, especially the small, overgrown specimens, were also poor people's food for a long time. In the engraving "The Lean Kitchen" by the older Pieter Brueghel, emaciated figures with starving faces fish oysters out of a large bowl.
Charles Dickens found it remarkable in 1836 that poverty and oysters always go together.
And in late nineteenth-century New York, oysters were sold as a cheap street food and hot-dog competitor.
Several billion copies are said to have been sipped every year in the United States alone at that time.
The Torture of the Restaurant Critic
The global oyster orgy was over after the natural occurrence of the shellfish had been drastically reduced by overexploitation and ruthless fishing methods with huge bottom trawls.
Since then, the oysters have been a luxury product that is not only highly valued by many human gourmets - snails bore a hole in the shell with their rasping tongue, crabs crack open with their claws, starfish break open with their arms, because they also know that oysters are at least as nutritious as they are tasty.