Oysters on Chinese social media menu

Mollusks invade Denmark beaches, prompting embassy plea - and attracting huge attention in China

Oysters are a food that you either love or hate - but Chinese social media users have come to the rescue of Denmark, which has been inundated by giant Pacific oysters.

Denmark imported the Pacific bivalve mollusks a few years back, but now they have got out of hand. Birds that would normally either crack them open with their beaks, or drop them from a great height, have found the newcomers impossible to handle.

They've invaded Denmark's beaches, making it impossible for swimmers to enjoy their daily dip.

Enter Chinese social media.

The Danish embassy in Beijing, perhaps recognizing the old Chinese adage that you should eat everything that has its back to the sun, put out a tongue-in-cheek appeal on the highly successful Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo, appealing for help from Chinese seafood lovers.

The response was overwhelming - at one point, 8.4 million people had read it and 15,000 had commented.

One user commented that as soon as the oysters spotted a Chinese person on the shore, they would jump back into the sea.

In the United Kingdom and the United States, there's a saying that you shouldn't eat oysters unless there is an R in the month. Well, I disproved that on May 3 by eating a whole plateful of my favorite shellfish - and I am still alive.

Among the 15,000 serious inquiries from Weibo users were commercial propositions from Chinese companies offering to ship the offending mollusks to China, and, I am told, there was a surge in Chinese tourists seeking to visit Denmark.

The 17th century Anglo-Irish man of letters Jonathan Swift commented that "it was a brave man who first opened an oyster", but his words of caution have since been outweighed by the apparent health benefits - oysters, I read, are rich in zinc, iron and calcium - not to mention selenium, whatever that is. You also get vitamins A and B by the bucket load, and oysters are very low in calories.

So what's not to like? Denmark has a population of about 5.6 million, and I am sure not all are seafood lovers. In fact, if you type Danish food into a search engine online, you get a sense of a cuisine heavy in pork, liver, bacon and potatoes, and not a lot of seafood. Certainly no mention of oysters.

However, other cuisines are replete with mentions of oysters - in Singapore, whenever I go there, I make a beeline for Ah Chuan's Fried Oyster Stall in one of the countless hawker food stall areas.

In China, they fry them, steam them and use them to make oyster sauce, in addition to swallowing them raw.

The French and the Brits both love oysters - some of my favorite memories of France are visiting harbor-side restaurants in Normandy and Brittany for their seafood platter royale, complete with oysters.

In Australia, which boasts some of the most unpolluted waters in the world, there's an oyster recipe that I don't think I'm about to try: Oysters Kilpatrick involves bacon, a barbecue and lashings of salty Worcestershire sauce.

No thank you.

I plan on sticking to my oysters on the shell, washed down with shallot vinegar, fresh lemon juice and a hearty glass of crisp Chablis.

This just in - it's China-Denmark Tourism Year. Hmmmm ......

The author is managing editor of the China Daily European Bureau. Contact him at chris@mail.chinadailyuk.com.

(China Daily European Weekly 05/12/2017 page13)