Purists insist that oysters should only be eaten raw, others are squeamish about raw oysters and will only eat them cooked, and still others, in the words of Μ. E K. Fisher, like them “hot, cold, thin, thick, dead, or alive”. Some people worry about eating oysters because of past incidents regarding infection by a bacterium closely related to cholera, but no new cases have been reported in several years. Others hesitate to eat oysters in months that don’t include the letter r for fear of contamination. In prerefrigeration days, there was justification for this concern, but nowadays oysters can be kept cold in the middle of August. While there is little health risk eating an oyster in the summer, it is true that oysters spawn during these months and become what oyster lovers call “milky”. This milkiness does have a somewhat unpleasant texture in the mouth and obscures the clean brininess that makes the best oysters so good.
