Being an Oyster Shucker Makes Me Hate Happy Hour Oysters

John Bil knows his oysters. Just ask him when you see him behind the counter of his newly opened fish shop, Honest Weight, in Toronto's west end Junction neighbourhood. After spending a decade working six days a week on oyster farms and processing plants in Prince Edward Island, he knows first-hand the shitty life of an oyster farmer and what it's like to spend five years growing a product, only to see it end up being sold for a buck during happy hour.

I wasn't much of a seafood eater, and oysters weren't exactly lighting my world when I was younger. Working on the land was always interesting to me, but it wasn't as interesting as working on the water. I just showed up on an oyster farm in PEI one day and said, "Yeah, I'd like to work here," even though I've never done any fishing or worked on the land. It's hard to say what about it interested me, but who knows why we get into anything, really?

I was on those farms for ten years, so it was more than a stage. It was a full-on career. I started making $7 an hour and it was horrible work with long hours. The thing with a lot of farming, whether it's wheat or chicken, is that there's a lot of automation and machinery. With oysters, especially in eastern Canada, it's pretty much all handwork.

You're driving around picking up oysters from other fishermen. You're standing for ten hours a day, six days a week on the cement floor in a cold building, dipping your hands in cold water, sorting oysters by shape and size, cleaning them, and putting them in trays. After that you're hopping into a van and driving around the island picking up oysters from other farms, loading up your van with 100 boxes filled with oysters that weigh 50 pounds (22.5 kg) each. You're then back at the plant to unload them. Man, these fucking oysters are so hard to grow, and you're just blowing them out for no profit and setting these prices in people's brains that they're only worth a buck. It's ridiculous. I sell them at $1.25 un-shucked and I already think that's a good deal.

We'd start growing them in late June when the oysters are the size of black pepper grains. Six to eight weeks after that they're the size of the head of a pin. By October they're as big as your baby fingernail, and when winter comes they're big enough to transfer them into mesh bags where they'll be suspended in the water so they won't be eaten by crabs or starfish on the floor. Every few months you'd pull the bags out, take out the dead oysters, dip the bags in salted sea water to get rid of any starfish that got in, and space the oysters out in more bags as they get bigger. By now it's been three or four years and you haven't harvested anything yet. Since you need a constant flow of product, you have a section of one-year oysters here and two-year-oysters there. You're dealing with thousands and thousands of bags of oysters, and it's all pretty much done by hand: the opening of the bags, the cleaning. It's misery.

In the winter, you have to cut through three feet of ice and send a diver down there. You put the oysters into containers and then haul them off on sleighs. Sometimes equipment falls through the ice, so it's a huge ordeal, especially when people are expecting to pay the same price they did in September. I'm thinking to myself, "Man, these people are killing themselves to get their oysters to you and you want them for 70 cents? No man, go get them yourself." It's so miserable. We decided to no longer do winter harvesting. You really have to love it because there really isn't a way to speed up this process. It's not like regular farming where you give the oysters food, since they eat plankton.

I was 27 when I started working on the farm, and out east there's dudes from 16 to 60 working there, but honestly, most of the younger guys are heading out west or to Toronto where you'd find easier work or more money. This kind of work is seasonal, and you don't get paid a lot, so you end up on unemployment insurance. My vehicle was repossessed a few times. I house-sat, lived with people, lived in my van, and I shucked oysters at bars at night to supplement my income. If I just relied on the oyster money it wouldn't have worked. In 1995, I was netting $240 a week, so that's about $12,000 a year for a 70, 80-hour week. It sucks. Now you might make $15 an hour, but it's still not a lot of dough.

If there's a bigger economic value to the oyster farm industry, then there will be more of a drive to help preserve the industry. But when we always need cheaper oyster prices, then the farms won't be seen as valuable, because no one wants to make good oysters when there's no money in it.

As to to Karon Liu