The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell Paperback by Mark Kurlansky (Random House Trade Paperbacks)

In Mark Kurlansky's wonderful book, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell we learn about the bivalve bounty that once existed off the shores of Manhattan. Kurlansnky writes, "By 1880, New York was the undisputed capital of history's greatest oyster boom in its golden age, which lasted until at least 1910. The oyster beds of the New York area were producing 700 million oysters a year."

The first blow to oyster production was sewage. "The reality is that millions of people produce far too much sewage to co-exist with millions of oysters...A million times worse than pollution happened. The silt and sludge alone would have been enough to kill oysters, which would sink in it and suffocate. But the industrial wastes consisted of heavy metals, including seven thousand pounds of zinc, copper, lead chromium, and nickel that entered the city sewer system every day...Between the 1940's and the 1970's, General Electric dumped hundreds of thousand of pounds of polycholorinated biphenyls, PCBs, into the Hudson..Concentrations of six heavy metals were found in the 1980's in the central muddy portion of the bay (Raritan). They had entered the water from the many factories built on the Raritan Rover during World War II. With the sentiment "anything for the war effort," these industries were allowed to freely dump into the river, and the practice continued after the war. In 1978, Raritan Bay was found to have the highest concentration of hydrocarbons. Fish in the bay were found to be laced with PCBs. The fish were often misshapen by a pollution-caused disease known as "fin-erosion disease." The Big Oyster.

World War II was the most destructive war in the history of mankind claiming the lives of around 60 to 70 million casualties worldwide; another casualty was the oyster beds of New York. America's Military Industrial Complex may have knocked off Hitler and Tojo, liberated the Nazi and Japanese concentration camps, but it also has the death of billions of oysters on its hands as well. In order to construct Freedom's Forge (Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II)and win World War II the tasty bivalves of New York had to walk the plank.