The Timeline

We decide to begin our narrative with the timeline which gives a general overview of the trends of oyster frequency in correlation to political, social or culture events that occurred during 1870-1970. Cultural or culinary events that were contemporaneous may have been reflected in the trend of oysters since the beginning of its history and popularity in New York. The animation shows the chronological appearance of events, while the bars on the timeline indicate the frequency of oyster dishes appearing on New York restaurant menus. This adds to the narrative of our entire research on the history of oysters.

This graph was created on Palladio and the animations were added using Keynote.

WHAT DOES THE TIMELINE

SHOW US?

There is initially a slow rise of oyster frequency where we see this dish really gaining popularity in the 1880s, going onto the 1900s. We see that there is a peak in 1900, which correlates with the sudden fluctuation in oyster frequency during that time, which reached up to almost 60 menus. At this time, oyster consumption reached over 1 billion this year, coming from Staten Island and harbor water ways.

In 1910, there was a sudden dip in the oysters’ frequency, when 600 million gallons of raw sewage per day was dumped into the harbor, inadvertently causing serious impacts on seafood wildlife and the general health of the harbor. This caused cholera and typhoid illnesses, while oysters were being dramatically over-harvested. Hence, this probably caused the dip in oyster frequency which was in steep decline since the first peak in the 1900s. Restaurants at this time, were likely skeptical of the oysters they were importing onto their customer’s dishes, and so there was a halt in the oyster consumption. The timeline also indicates that the oysters were being over-harvested, so for that period of time, there might have been a lack in resources or oyster populations that didn’t meet the consumer’s demand, since it was difficult to sell a good amount of raw oysters to restaurants.

Photograph Courtesy of The New York Post

Interestingly, an anomaly in which the timeline event does not correlate with the oyster frequency, is the peak right before 1920, which was when the oysters were just about to becoming very heavily contaminated with poisons from sewage runoffs due to the industrial revolution and bustling city of New York. Perhaps this can be attributed to the nonchalance towards this topic, or the unawareness of poisonous oysters during this time. More research could be done in investigating the extent of New Yorker’s knowledge or awareness of environmental pollution issues during the 1920s.

In 1921, when the New York City Health Department officially closed oyster beds to reduce the number of food borne illnesses in the state, there were nearly no oyster dishes seen on menus from 1921 to 1930, as shown in the bar frequency graph.

After the 1920s, oysters did not seem to have ever retained its popularity during its peaks in 1900s, and let alone 1920s. It can be inferred that because of this negligence towards environmental issues in the harbor, there were long term impacts that affected the quality and quantity of oysters all the way up until the last of this data set — despite governmental efforts to restore the harbor’s pristine environment by enabling the Clean Water Act in 1972.

From this visualization, we can deduce that political and cultural phenomena regarding oysters since the start of the oyster frenzy, until the 1990s, has influenced the culinary norms on menus as seen from the frequency of oyster dishes appearing in restaurants. From the peaks, we can see when oysters were the most popular, and from the dips, we can do further research to find the environmental influences during this time that impacted the availability or restaurant’s acceptance for oysters.