- [Narrator] Most people think it's a food safety issue.

You keep the oyster alive as long as possible

and that reduces the risk of bacterial contamination,

and there is a little bit of truth to that.

Oysters can carry a scary flesh-eating bacteria called

Vibrio vulnificus.

You can get it from oysters

or from swimming with an open wound in brackish water

where the bacteria lives.

But, let's put things in prospective.

- The risk of running into a bad oyster is phenomenally low.

My biggest pet peeve is people like,

go crazy over one bad oyster in the news,

but they don't really care that hundreds of thousands

of pounds of lettuce are contaminated with Salmonella.

- [Narrator] About 100 people die

from Vibrio infections each year.

About 450 die from Salmonella.

Plus, the FDA requires that oyster farm have to test

water quality before sending oysters

out to markets and restaurants,

and that's important because oysters are filter feeders,

they soak basically anything that's in the water around them

including fecal matter which can come from rain runoff.

Yak, but there's a clever little secret way you can check

how fresh your oysters are.

- One thing that you can ask for is a shellfish tag,

which every, retailer or restaurant is required to have

every bag of oyster that they purchase for up to 90 days,

after that purchase. So, that tag, if they don't have it,

don't eat those oysters.

- [Narrator] This tag is a way for restaurant

to track where and when the oysters were farmed.

Qiu says that she looks for the most recent dates

on the tag, anything further out than two weeks

won't taste this good, and increases the risk

of a bad oyster.

Some chefs may look at you funny

for asking for this documentation,

but it's a strategy that apparently works.

- I tried to do the math and I probably had

over six or seven thousand oysters by now in my lifetime

and I've never gotten sick once from an oyster.

- [Narrator] Basically, oysters are safe.

So, question, why on earth are they still sometimes alive

or dying when we're eating them?

- You really want you're raw shellfish to be

absolutely fresh and, you know, the freshest you can get

is something that is just very recently killed.

So, it goes back to not only the food safety

but the actual taste and the texture of that oyster

to me just far superior.

- [Narrator] So, basically freshly killed oysters

taste better, and it's hard to tell exactly

when an oyster dies, because before it's served it's shocked

and shocking is, how should I put this,

shocking is not a gentle process.

Shocking involves separating the oyster abductor muscle

form its shell, this muscle gives the oyster control over opening and closing the shell,

similar to how your spinal cord helps you move.

So, severing their abductor muscle is almost like,

severing you spine. Yikes!

Most restaurants in the US keep their oysters alive on ice

up until the shocking process, which either kills the oyster

or renders it completely immobile.

Since they don't move around much in the first place

it's kind of hard to tell which.

So it's easy to feel guilty sitting there, eating an oyster

that was either just killed or is maybe dying.

But consider the oyster biology.

It's very primitive, so it's possible

they might not even feel pain at all.

- [Julie Qiu] They don't have a brain,

they're not really processing pain in the same way

that we process, any kind of feeling,

so, I don't believe that they are feeling pain

in the same way that we are thinking of it.

- [Narrator] So, really it's a up to you,

if you don't wanna eat oyster, that's fine,

and if you do you won't be the first.

- It's one of the few foods that have not changed in like,

thousands and thousands of years.

So, being able to appreciate a food that has remained

unchanged for that long is something really special

and remarkable and I think it should be celebrated

for what it is.

(instrumental music)