Perhaps no food conveys a sense of place like the oyster. To tip back a Cape May Salt or Forty North Rose Cove and sip its brine is to kiss its native waterway on the lips, in a paraphrase of French poet Léon-Paul Fargue. It is to commune with season and location, a humble creature transformed by salt and time into something far more grand. It is to taste the point where river gives way to sea, the best of two ecosystems colliding.

An eight-part series:

• Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Delaware Bay Oyster
• Healthy Barnegat Bay, Healthy Market
• Oyster Innovation: Building Reefs, Business, and Community
• Old Stock, New Generation
• The Oyster Farmers
• How Rutgers Revitalized an Industry
• The Overlooked History of the Bayshore
• Bivalve Glossary

Published in the High Summer 2017 Issue