While today’s New Yorkers gladly gulp down oysters in some of the city’s fanciest restaurants, many are unaware that the oyster trade used to be one of the most important industries in the area.

“Oysters were on every street corner the way that hot dog stands are today,” says Emily Driscoll, director of the new documentary, Shellshocked. “[They] were so ingrained in culture and society, then completely vanished in a couple of decades.”

The film, whose full title is Shellshocked: Saving Oysters to Save Ourselves, explores the crucial role these shellfish played in New York’s environmental and cultural past, as well as the movement to make a place for them in the city’s future.

Once upon a time, New York Harbor was lined with 300 square miles of oyster reefs (around 260,000 acres). Then, as now, the bivalves were threatened by pollution. In the early 1900s, typhoid and cholera outbreaks were traced to oysters from Staten Island and many oyster farms were shut down. Since then, their presence has been almost erased from the city’s collective memory.

The oysters’ disappearance is a problem for more than just epicureans. Much as coral does in the tropical seas, oyster reefs can provide the foundation for an entire marine ecosystem in temperate waters. Additionally, oysters play a key role in removing excess nitrogen from the water system, and excess nitrogen in the Hudson River Estuary System has led to an explosion of algae, crowding out fish and other wildlife.

New York’s oyster reefs once made up the “dominant ecosystem of the area,” says the aptly named Murray Fisher, program director of the New York Harbor School. Founded in 2003 as a part of the New York City public school system, the Harbor School plays a key role in running an oyster restoration project that Driscoll chose to feature in Shellshocked.

Photo by Oyster Restoration Research Project.

The school trains around 420 high school students in six environmental and maritime tracks including aquaculture and marine biology research. Currently, students are growing oysters from a shipment of 1.5 million larvae (or oyster seeds). All of the larvae are Eastern oysters, the same species that inhabited the harbor and the rest of the Atlantic coastline 100 years ago.

“There are 1.1 million kids in the New York City public school system and the New York Harbor is still one of the richest water habitats in the world,” says Fisher. “But it’s become very degraded and disconnected from those 1.1 million kids.” If New York wants to manage its marine ecosystem well over the next several hundred years, he adds, the next generation of New Yorkers will need to feel a connection to the harbor — and have the skills, knowledge, and training to manage it.

A native New Yorker from age 7, Driscoll was similarly seeking to bridge the divide that exists between the city’s inhabitants and their natural surroundings. “A lot of New Yorkers forget that this is an island and we’re surrounded by this incredible body of water,” she says.

Another way to cultivate this connection to the harbor is through art, such as the work of Mara Haseltine, an environmental artist and professor at The New School. Haseltine began designing porcelain oyster shells when she learned about restrictions that prevented empty oyster shells from restaurants being returned to the water. The porcelain shells can be placed in the water, providing additional oyster habitats. Haseltine also creates larger-scale structures to which the oysters can attach and describes her work as “creating skeletons for future aquatic life.”

Driscoll believes the efforts to restore these oyster reefs can set an example for other communities with ecosystems at risk. “People can work within their own expertise to put oysters back in the water. The Harbor School sets an incredible example of protecting and restoring an ecosystem in their own backyard. Mara worked with what she had.”

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers crew drops rock material into the water in order to create an artificial oyster reef off of N.Y.C.'s Governors Island. (Photo by USACE Public Affairs.)

The bitter irony? Even if Haseltine, the students at the Harbor School, and others succeed at bringing back the New York oyster population, they’ll still be too toxic to eat. Unless you like high levels of dioxin, PCBs, mercury, and bacteria from sewage runoff.

“If it rains more than one-16th of an inch in N.Y.C., it overwhelms the sewage treatment plants, and they shut them down and all rainwater and raw sewage is combined and overflows into the harbor. That happens 60 times a year,” explains Fisher.

Nonetheless, oysters can play a key role in mitigating New York Harbor pollution and enabling other species to survive. The efforts to regenerate the population are especially needed as ocean acidification and a rise in diseases linked to climate change pose new threats for the mollusks.

“There’s so much more that needs to be done to restore waterways, in addition to bringing the oysters back,” adds Driscoll. “Oysters are incredible creatures but they can only do so much.”

Watch the trailer for Shellshocked:

The new film Eating Alabama starts out along similar lines, as filmmaker Andrew Beck Grace and his wife Rashmi return to their home state of Alabama to film a yearlong attempt to eat locally and seasonally. In the process, Andrew sifts through family photos of farms long buried under suburbia, and travels the state interviewing the farmers scraping by in present day Alabama. The result is a film that artfully combines one family’s story with an in-depth look at a group of small farmers committed to rebuilding the local food system in the South.

In addition to “plantation crops” like cotton and peanuts, Alabama is a major meat producer. The state has the third-largest broiler (chicken) industry in the nation, with over 1 billion birds and 2 billion eggs sold annually and livestock and poultry combined accounting for four-fifths of the commodities sold in the state. Many of the small farmers shown in the film are diversifying, and moving away from this model — raising livestock with alternative methods, but also growing greens and cultivating orchards.

We caught up with Grace to discuss the film, the story it sheds light on, and the way Alabama fits into the larger picture of today’s agriculture.

Andrew and Rashmi.

Q. How long did you spend filming Eating Alabama?

A. We started April 1, 2008 with the intention to film this story about a year of local eating. The problem was that about halfway through the year I realized that the story was a lot more complicated than just young folks looking for local food. The interesting story was all these related issues about how much we’ve changed, how far away from the land we’ve gotten, and how little we actually know about where the food comes from.

Q. Over the past four years, many areas have seen a rise in community-supported agriculture programs and farmers markets. Were you seeing any of those changes while you were filming?

A. We’re seeing that local food economies are starting to happen and make sense for larger cities. But it’s ironic because the rural areas that used to produce so much food are now the slowest to adopt these local food pursuits. I think a lot of it has to do with money and a lot of it has to do with people wanting to get off the land. Having had conversations with rural folks, I found that if you grew up on a farm then your ambition is to go off and make money, not to come back to the farm.

A lot of the growth in farming and sustainable growers around the country comes from college-educated people who have been off the land for a couple of generations and want to come back to the place, to try to start something completely different from the world they grew up in.

Q. What has triggered this wave of college graduates returning to the land?

A. We have this significant disconnect from actual process, from making things and having tactile interactions with the stuff of our lives. So I think that partly it’s people looking to find a more meaningful life through hard work.

Q. You’ve described yourself as a “Southerner with reservations” and in the movie you struggle against a nostalgic vision of Alabama’s history. How do you see Alabama and the South fitting into the larger agricultural context of the U.S.?

A. The form of agriculture that existed in the South for most of our history has been one of exploitation — exploitation of the land and exploitation of the people. That’s nothing to glorify, that’s nothing to long for or to want to go back to. As a filmmaker I had to reconcile the parts of an agrarian life that I do think were meaningful and valuable with the realities of the way that system and economy worked.

I see in the work [Alabama small farmers] are doing now a real harmony between the land and the people who work it, one that has really never existed in Alabama agriculture until recently. And I really am hopeful that … a more equitable situation for farmers will be the end result of a growing movement towards local food economies.

Q. What do you mean by local food economies?

A. I think of a local food economy as being a holistic system that begins with the consumer. The consumer has to understand that his or her food dollars are a kind of vote. The way you choose to spend your money on food has its own power. The more you decide to eat seasonally and locally and make those conscious decisions to engage with a local food economy, the more the economy grows and you start to see that money in your own backyard.

Q. One thing that surprised me in the film was the absence of African-American farmers, who have long been a part of Alabama’s agricultural heritage. Why weren’t they shown?

A. That’s something I struggled a lot with in the making of this film. There really are not a lot of African-American farmers in Alabama, partially because of issues relating to land and land ownership.

There’s a long history that’s tragic and fascinating and complicated — things that made it difficult to put in my movie, which is a personal story about my own family and our relationship to the land. Many African-Americans ended up losing land that they got after the Civil War and there’s a significant issue regarding the loss of black land ownership in the rural South.

I see a lot of my young white friends [wanting] to return to the land, but there’s not [as much of] that same desire in the African-American community, which was tied only a generation or two ago to a rural existence. If you think about the kinds of lives that African-Americans lived in rural areas throughout the history of the South, there’s not a lot there to romanticize.

Q. In the movie you go deer hunting and help slaughter chickens. Did you make a conscious decision not to spend the year as a vegetarian?

A. I’m a big fan of good stewardship when raising animals. In the movie we show my friend Nathan Thompson, who runs a chicken house where he raises about a million birds every year almost by himself. I don’t want to engage in that system of corporate farming and big contained animal feeding operations anymore — there’s such a small amount of money left for the farmers and so much of it is filtered up to the corporations. I am trying to make an argument for a local food economy that includes meat if it’s been ethically, humanely raised, and where the farmer gets a proper share of the worth of the animal.

There’s also close to one deer for every three people in the state of Alabama, so we have a significant overcrowding of the deer population … There are terrible issues with inbreeding and lack of food. Wildlife management in the form of hunting is one way to combat some of these issues.

Q. Your year of local eating is officially over. So what did you eat for dinner last night?

A. Last night we had parsley pesto pasta. The parsley was from our garden and the pasta … well it wasn’t local but it was organic.

Watch the trailer for Eating Alabama: