Raising Shellfish To Eat

Raising Shellfish To Eat

I am writing this sitting in the kitchen sink. The reason I am doing this is that yesterday I bought some shellfish, and at the time I did not have a recipe to cook them with. So I took them home and put them in our kitchen sink, which is full of water, and let them sit there overnight. This morning when I woke up, one was dead, but two were still alive. They looked very lively and happy, so I decided to kill them immediately before they died of old age or something like that.

This might seem a bit callous of me, but it is not my fault; it's my mother's fault. She taught me all about raising shellfish for food, and how to tell if they are still fresh enough to eat. As far as she was concerned, if you found some shellfish on the beach or somewhere like that, you could just pick them up and eat them right away. You did not need to go through the whole business of keeping them in water overnight before killing them.

This is what she told me happened: When she was a little girl growing up in New England during the last century (that is what she always said--"during the last century"), her mother used to send her down to

A much more important reason is that if you have a shellfish farm, you feed your shellfish and they get fat and happy and multiply. If you have a cattle ranch, you feed your cattle and they get fat and happy and die.