DH101 FINAL PROJECT
THE DATE RANGE
Lastly, we decided to wrap things up by looking into the frequency of Blue Point Oysters on menus and how long they stayed on the menu in correlation with the way they were served within 1870 to 1970. Within our time frame, were they served raw or cooked more often? Because now we know the causes (as shown from the environmental statistics page prior to this one), we can investigate the effects to see if the environment impacted culinary practices and norms at this time.
DURATION OF BLUE POINTS ON MENUS, DIFFERENTIATED BY HOW THEY WERE SERVED IN RESTAURANTS
The box chart above, created with courtesy to RAW Graphs, is a visualization of the frequency of oysters, categorized by the way they were served on the menus from the NYPL. Here, we were trying to look for whether there were any changes in the way people ate oysters, which we could then potentially infer as a difference in the quality of oysters that were served. Specifically speaking, if the environmental impacts were heavy during a certain time, the oysters served during that time may be cooked, rather than eaten raw. Raw foods have a higher chance of containing bacteria which could lead to food poisoning, so it is assumed that people — knowing that there are environmental issues in the New York bay during the time — would prefer to have their oysters cooked. On the y axis of the box chart, we labeled each category as raw or cooked, to simply what we are looking at.
The box chart shows that there was only one type of cooked oysters on the menus from 1890 to 1980, which is “Fried Blue Point Oysters” that appear around 1918 until 1919 (depicted in dark purple). This is not as many as cooked oyster dishes as we would have expected with environmental issues increasing in the New York harbor during this time (as corroborated from the “Environmental Statistics” visualization). The lack of a change in how oysters are served according to this menu data set, potentially reflects the cache of “blue point oysters” and the prestige associated to eating them raw this way as it has always been commonly served in New York (as we can see that there are more than one half shell oyster servings on the y axis).
Nonetheless, we can still use this box chart in support of our hypothesis that there was a change in the menu to do with oysters, because nearly no oysters were seen before 1905. Of course, we are not able to generalize this information and conclude that there were no oysters served on menus at all before 1905, but there was definitely an increase after 1910 which correlates with the first visualization. This is corroborated by Andrew Hurley (Hurley, 1994), who suggests that there were many sources of toxic waste during the “second industrial revolution” from rotting flesh from nearby sausage factories and feces from nearby dog pounds. In addition, there was near constant toxic run-off from oil refining, chemical production, glue making, and fertilizer manufacturing nearby as well. These environmental factors could have contributed to why our data is so focused within 1910-1920, and that there was little data afterwards, because of the listed detriments that Hurley examined.
If we look back to the timeline from the first page, our box chart of date ranges correlates with the frequency of oysters. Most of the data we were able to extract from the dataset ranged from 1910-1920, which is where there was a peak in oyster frequency as shown on the timeline.
WHAT'S THE SIGNIFICANCE?
This visualization of the date ranges in which oysters were served either raw or cooked, demonstrates the importance of raw oysters on New York menus. Despite environmental impacts caused by the second Industrial Revolution during this time, menus were still adamant on serving oysters raw, as this may have been associated with the prestige of not only the dish, but their restaurant. Out of the entire data set, we were only able to acquire these few oyster dishes that stayed on menus for a prolonged time, and no oyster dishes appeared for more than one year prior to 1890 or after 1920 according to this chart (excluding the longest bar for “Blue Point Oysters on Half Shell”). The statistics for this visualization is also corroborated by the timeline (see Timeline visualization on Menu) where oyster appear most frequently between the 1900s and the 1920s, which falls into the time frame displayed on this box chart.