(instrumental music) - [Narrator] Most people think
it's a food safety issue. You keep the oyster
alive as long as possible and that reduces the risk
of bacterial contamination, and there is a little
bit of truth to that. Oysters can carry a scary
flesh-eating bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus. You can get it from oysters or from swimming with an
open wound in brackish water where the bacteria lives. But, let's put things in prospective. - The risk of running into a
bad oyster is phenomenally low. My biggest pet peeve is people like, go crazy over one bad oyster in the news, but they don't really care
that hundreds of thousands of pounds of lettuce are
contaminated with Salmonella. - [Narrator] About 100 people die from Vibrio infections each year. About 450 die from Salmonella. Plus, the FDA requires that
oyster farm have to test water quality before sending oysters out to markets and restaurants, and that's important because
oysters are filter feeders, they soak basically anything
that's in the water around them including fecal matter which
can come from rain runoff. Yak, but there's a clever
little secret way you can check how fresh your oysters are. - One thing that you can
ask for is a shellfish tag, which every, retailer or
restaurant is required to have every bag of oyster that they
purchase for up to 90 days, after that purchase. So, that
tag, if they don't have it, don't eat those oysters. - [Narrator] This tag
is a way for restaurant to track where and when
the oysters were farmed. Qiu says that she looks
for the most recent dates on the tag, anything
further out than two weeks won't taste this good,
and increases the risk of a bad oyster. Some chefs may look at you funny for asking for this documentation, but it's a strategy that apparently works. - I tried to do the
math and I probably had over six or seven thousand
oysters by now in my lifetime and I've never gotten
sick once from an oyster. - [Narrator] Basically, oysters are safe. So, question, why on earth
are they still sometimes alive or dying when we're eating them? - You really want you're
raw shellfish to be absolutely fresh and, you
know, the freshest you can get is something that is just
very recently killed. So, it goes back to not
only the food safety but the actual taste and
the texture of that oyster to me just far superior. - [Narrator] So, basically
freshly killed oysters taste better, and it's
hard to tell exactly when an oyster dies, because
before it's served it's shocked and shocking is, how should I put this, shocking is not a gentle process. Shocking involves separating
the oyster abductor muscle form its shell, this muscle
gives the oyster control over opening and closing the shell, similar to how your spinal
cord helps you move. So, severing their abductor
muscle is almost like, severing you spine. Yikes! Most restaurants in the US
keep their oysters alive on ice up until the shocking process,
which either kills the oyster or renders it completely immobile. Since they don't move around
much in the first place it's kind of hard to tell which. So it's easy to feel guilty
sitting there, eating an oyster that was either just
killed or is maybe dying. But consider the oyster biology. It's very primitive, so it's possible they might not even feel pain at all. - [Julie Qiu] They don't have a brain, they're not really processing
pain in the same way that we process, any kind of feeling, so, I don't believe that
they are feeling pain in the same way that
we are thinking of it. - [Narrator] So, really it's a up to you, if you don't wanna eat
oyster, that's fine, and if you do you won't be the first. - It's one of the few foods
that have not changed in like, thousands and thousands of years. So, being able to appreciate
a food that has remained unchanged for that long is
something really special and remarkable and I think
it should be celebrated for what it is. (instrumental music)
