Giving Compass' Take:

• Sam Bloch explains how researchers discovered that climate change is impacting the safety of oysters, necessitating a particular delivery process to avoid making consumers sick. 

• This is one example of how climate change will alter everyday commercial food production, processing, and shipping. 

• Learn more about the relationship between food and the environment. 

Oysters are America’s most valuable shellfish—a $200-million industry built on raw bars and dollar happy hours. To keep up with demand, they’re increasingly harvested and shipped year-round. Time was, no one wanted to eat a bivalve that sat out in the sun, or had the watery, unpleasant taste of summer spawning. But now, with refrigerated supply chains, orders to harvest oysters in the morning before midday heat, and infertile mutant oysters that grow in warm water, the happy hour never ends.

But our growing appetite for oysters on the half-shell has potential consequences—like vibriosis, aka Vibrio, a fatal disease caused by bacteria that thrive in higher temperatures. The most common strain in the United States, Vibrio parahaemolyticus, causes 45,000 illnesses every year, resulting in vomiting and diarrhea. And it’s getting worse: Increasingly, the bacteria is thriving in oysters from the Long Island Sound, Connecticut, and even Alaska, states where the ocean waters have heated up over the last few years.

So are we ready for this climate-induced, diarrhea-causing, warm oyster apocalypse? We just might be. For the first time, a new study from researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Virginia Tech, and the Pacific Shellfish Institute traces America’s oyster cold chain—another name for the temperature-controlled conditions perishable foods undergo all the way from farm to plate. Among their findings? Shipping oysters might make them safer.

What did they find? In 75 percent of shipments, temperatures were consistently held below the bacterial threshold of 50 degrees. As they moved further along the cold chain, they got even colder, with the bivalves dropping to an average of 39 degrees. Overall, due to those lower temperatures, the oysters were more at risk of bacterial growth at the beginning of their journey to the consumer than at the end.

Read the full article about oysters by Sam Bloch at The New Food Economy