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The Billion Oyster Project: Reversing History to Move Forward

  • Writer: boxton9
    boxton9
  • Dec 5, 2022
  • 1 min read

Updated: Jan 16, 2023

Edible Manhattan/Edible Brooklyn, March 2022


By Julia Sexton


I've always been obsessed by the history of New York Harbor: both my Italian maternal grandfather and my Swedish paternal great-grandfather had maritime careers on this water. I also just love oysters.


There's a story behind the imagery here. I knew that we couldn't just shoot farmed oysters for this story—they look vastly different from the gnarled, clustered, irregularly sized oysters that once made up New York Harbor's reefs. We ended up arranging for The Billion Oyster Project to send us a treasured remnant of the historical reef that they use in their educational programs. This took some some convincing! Then our brilliant designer, Lori Pedrick—who is also an accomplished photographer—shot the ghost oysters and mailed them (very carefully packed) back to the BOP. As a thanks, she also sent them big gorgeous prints of her photos.


Unwilling to let this story go, I followed it up with a digital post about the fate of the last Manhattan oyster barge.



















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About Me

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I Was Supposed to Go to Grad School

Growing up in a large, loud family of 7, they use to call me “Pass Me The, Pass Me The” for the way that I’d try to doctor my dinner with whatever condiments were on hand. At about 8 or 9, I gave up on condiments and took control of dinner entirely, cooking out of a beat-up copy of The New York Times Cookbook that I still own, my little penciled-in annotations intact. I cooked for 7 people nightly, all throughout high school. By the time I was winding up college, I’d become a damn fine cook.

 

My father was a professor of American History. I figured I’d follow in those footsteps, teaching Dickens to 18-year-olds who were not at all interested. I gathered applications to doctorate programs, meanwhile, I took a job as a waiter in a busy catering company. The kitchen where I worked was perpetually understaffed—my cooking skills were quickly identified and I was press-ganged onto their crew. I LOVED it—the excitement, the creativity, the freedom, the trench humor, learning professional cooking techniques. There I stayed for several years while my graduate school applications gathered dust.

 

Cue me, later, a refugee from a crash-and-burn restaurant opening where I was not only the sous-chef, but also the loan application writer and babysitter for a chef/owner who had gone spectacularly off the rails. By then, I had a couple of herniated discs and no desire to stay in restaurants. I moved back to the world of words, and I’ve never looked back. 

 

Since then, I’ve been a restaurant critic, a national award-winning blogger, a food journalist, a travel writer, a columnist, a cookbook author, and the editor-in-chief of four Edible titles. I can’t wait to see what's next.

 

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