It’s popular to speculate about who might have pried open and slurped the sweet, briny meat of an oyster first. But here on the West Coast, the evidence is ancient.

Wherever you find a calm beach or a cozy cove, you’ll often also see a slash of white in the sea-eroded bank, a layer of crushed shells, tossed here by feasting indigenous families.

For like salmon, oysters (and related shellfish) were a staple food for coastal Salish people, and the many shell middens dotting our island coastlines, literally the litter of history, tell us where they lived and harvested these briny bivalves.

Fast forward to the 21st century and oysters are still a west coast obsession.  Oyster farming in B.C., mainly on the west coast of Vancouver Island along the shores of Baynes Sound and the Discovery Islands further north, is a $40-million industry. We are the largest oyster-farming province in the country, producing 60 percent of Canada’s 26,000-tonne annual crop.