There is a moment, eating an oyster, when you hold the cold ocean in your mouth. We eat oysters while they are still alive. They may or may not be aphrodisiacs. They switch sex throughout the course of their lives, which food writer M.F.K. Fisher famously described as “dreadful but exciting.”

 

Oysters, according to their devotees, are intriguing. But are they beautiful? Prince Edward Island native Rodney Clark thinks so, and he has built an oyster empire in tribute.

 

“An oyster caught my imagination because I came from an art background,” says Clark, taking a break from caring for the oyster beds that are part of Rodney’s Oyster Depot in Nine Mile Creek, P.E.I. But it wasn’t just the mottled sculpture of the oyster, pitted and laced with trapped pieces of sea grass, that grabbed him.

 

“An oyster is one of the few things that has to be worked by hand, other than candles and leather,” he says. “No machine does it. Oyster growing is an art. It’s so passionately painful to watch oysters grow, and to deal with things you can never control -- Mother Nature and human nature.”

 

 In the 1980s Clark was in Toronto, trying to make a living as a commercial artist, when the seeds of a life constructed around the artistic oyster started to come together. His father, J.A. Clark, owned MAPCO, a building-supply distributor. He would sweet talk a bit of space onto the back of P.E.I. potato trucks headed to Toronto. But it wasn’t for sending along more building supplies. It was for oysters, a few boxes for special clients.

 

Clark would meet the truck and deliver his dad’s boxes. Sometimes there was an extra box, and he would call his father and ask what to do with it. “He’d say, ‘For Christ’s sake, sell it!’ So I started asking people if they ate oysters. Now, oysters are a black-and-white food. There’s no grey area. You’re either going to strip down to the waist and dive into them or you’re going to pass.”

 

Customers were often unsure how to open the oysters, so they would invite Clark over to their houses to shuck them. “A little business developed,” he says. “In private homes I established the value of the product, not the spin. In those days, every oyster was beautiful—exceptionally consistent in size, in meat quality, in shape. It was an easy enough job to present premium oysters and have people enjoy them.”

 

With Torontonians catching on to the delicious cold, clean, ocean taste, in 1986 Clark opened Rodney’s Oyster House in downtown Toronto. It started with six employees. More than 20 years later, Rodney’s continues to prosper. It now has 68 employees, and customers are often lined up at the door.

 

“Clark can be credited for getting Torontonians to slurp from the half shell,” wrote Toronto Star food critic Amy Pataki. Not so, says Clark, who insists the star is the food. “It’s always the oyster that brings [customers],” he says. “It’s never the people. It’s never me. It’s the product.”

 

Today Clark isn’t happy with the quality of most oysters for sale. “The consistency is gone. Mature oysters have basically dispersed and given way to puny oysters. It’s become a name game—throw a name on an oyster to try and increase the price.”

 

Clark is having none of it. At his Oyster Depot in Nine Mile Creek, he’s determined to bring back the beauty of the oysters he used to pull off potato trucks. It takes years to produce good-size oysters. The ones Clark has seeded in P.E.I. are growing between 1/32 of an inch and half an inch per year. He’s willing to wait.

 

“At the end of the day, Dad would be down on his knees in the basement, packing wooden boxes of oysters for those clients of his. There was no reason why he should be there, but he was. He would find a gigantic oyster, and he would hide it in the bottom corner—a surprise to be discovered. He’d mix small and large choices throughout the rest of the box.

 

“It made a wonderful story. People would get the boxes, rip off the eelgrass, and see a canister of his homemade oyster sauce and a note. He’d say, ‘Wait until they get to the big one. They’ll be on the phone the next morning.’ And they were.

 

“You can’t tell me those people didn’t feel his passion when they opened that box. I want people to feel that passion too. I want people to love the goddamned stuff.”

 

Genuine passion and care, even when a product takes years to produce, can’t be undersold. It builds businesses and art, and a sense of amore layered world.

 

Kathleen Martin is a freelance journalist based in Halifax. She can be reached at masthead@ns.sympatico.ca.