The interchangeable reef: the ecology and economics of shrimp and oyster consumption in twentieth-century Creole cuisine

In the late nineteenth century, the most popular type of shellfish in New Orleans was oysters; by the middle of the twentieth century, it was shrimp. Drawing on cookbooks, restaurant menus, trade advertisements, and fishery reports, this article traces how the decline of oyster reefs along the Gulf coast paralleled marketing and infrastructure changes that made shrimp easier to catch, process and sell. Rather than treating this shift as evidence of changing consumer taste, this article argues that shrimp and oysters were never culinarily distinct to begin with and that Creole cuisine instead asked eaters to remain loyal only to the idea of eating well, not to any particular ingredient. This structural flexibility allowed the shrimp industry’s rise to be absorbed into local foodways with remarkably little resistance or public mourning for the ingredient it replaced. In tracing this history, this article intervenes in food studies scholarship that has emphasized the social dimensions of modern foodways while underweighting the ecological ones, offering a case study for how cuisines can obscure the environmental costs of the foods they nonetheless celebrate.