Olympic Trials 
The native Olympia oyster of the Pacific Northwest is so rare that it is almost never seen 
by Raymond Sokolov 
“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said, 
“Is what we chiefly need: 
Pepper and vinegar besides 
Are very good indeed — 
Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear, 
We can begin to feed.” 
But answer came there none — 
And this was scarcely odd because 
They’d eaten every one. 
Lewis Carroll 
Through the Looking-Glass 
Oysters naturally just stay put, lying 
in their salty beds, waiting for people 
to eat them. As Saki put it, “There’s 
nothing in Christianity or Buddhism 
that quite matches the sympathetic 
unselfishness of an oyster.” Taking ad- 
vantage of such complaisance has 
been a human habit since prehistoric 
times. And in each place where people 
have found abundant colonies of oys- 
ters, they have attacked them whole- 
sale, downing dozen after dozen, until 
what had begun as a cheap snack for 
Everyman was so depleted that only 
the wealthy could continue to feast 
with traditional abandon. 
In Britain today, Colchester oysters 
are now a luxury, but in Dickens’s 
Pickwick Papers (1837), Sam Weller 
observes: “Poverty and oysters always 
seems to go together.” The same proc- 
ess occurred in this country, where 
early settlers on the Atlantic coast 
considered oysters poor people’s food, 
and contemporary New Yorkers pay 
a premium price for increasingly 
scarce specimens of Crassostrea vir- 
ginica. On our Pacific coast, the sit- 
uation is far worse. 
The native Olympia oyster, Ostrea 
lurida, is so rare that it is almost 
never seen, even in the state of Wash- 
Delicate “Olys” (foreground), the 
native Olympia oysters, are smaller 
and tastier than the large Pacifies 
that have replaced them. 
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