Oyster roister
Sir: Patrick Forman (Letters, 27 August) need not look to a conspiracy by the oyster factors of Billingsgate to explain the dearth of cheap gigass (Pacific) oysters.
In 1974, when I visited a number of the experimental stations breeding the gigass I was told that this oyster would flourish in our waters. Perhaps it does. It is more than ten years since I left the trade but at the time it seemed to me that they had not fully addressed certain problems: a) that our culture had long since lost whatever mass taste it may have had for oysters, b) it would be difficult to restore such a taste with a creature which, in its raw state, lacked plate-appeal (to put it politely) and c) the distribution costs, particularly at point of sale to the table, would be the same for both the gigass and the so-called native (usually the offspring of Brittany oysters relaid in our waters) and would be by far the greater part of the total cost.
It is conceivable that a mass market, wholly outside the supposed control of Billingsgate oyster factors, might have been created by a sustained and expensive, if not explicit, television advertising campaign claiming that the gigass improved male sexual performance two or three fold; unfortunately such a claim would have had to be true or the decline in the market would have been as pronounced as the decline in other departments.
WGM Angliss
3 Crown Street, Woolley Street, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire.
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