Mussels

In most of North America, mussels were almost ignored as a food source until the last half of the twentieth century. Mussels were known in Europe and Great Britain as edible, although some cookery literature pointed out that people sometimes became sick after eating them. As filter feeders, mussels are susceptible to the toxic algae blooms commonly called red tide, and the threat of food poisoning may have discouraged consumers. There was very minor commercial gathering of mussels for the New York market, and an effort was made around the turn of the twentieth century to persuade consumers to use them. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, with clams becoming scarce and expensive and with the public becoming more aware of various ethnic mussel dishes, the shellfish grew in popularity. Mussels are fairly abundant in the wild but are being water-farmed from rafts where cables seeded with juvenile mussels hang, allowing the mussels to feed off naturally occurring plankton until they are a harvestable size.