The Gulf of Mexico is known for its bounty — blue crab, shrimp, grouper, tuna, oysters — but ever since oil tainted a portion of the Gulf’s fishing grounds, the seafood has been a tough sell.

Even though much of the oil that spilled from last April’s Deepwater Horizon rig explosion has been cleaned up, the future is still murky for people who make a living plying Gulf waters.

Mike Voisin is a seventh-generation Louisiana oysterman.

“Once it was capped, everybody brought out that proverbial sigh of relief, like ‘Whew, we’re through this thing.’ Well we weren’t, and we still aren’t,” Voisin says.

Voisin is president of Motivatit Seafoods, an oyster processing company in Houma, La. His workers are shucking oysters mostly from Texas these days.

The Biggest Challenge

Before the spill, Louisiana produced half of the oysters sold from the Gulf. Voisin’s business was down 60 percent after the spill, and it has been slow to recover. The state’s fisheries are projected to lose $74 million this year from the lingering impact of the oil spill.

“People are hesitant to buy Gulf shrimp or Gulf product coming out of this oil area,” says Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham.

Most oyster grounds are open again. But they’re not producing nearly what they did before, in part because of damage caused by flushing freshwater out of the Mississippi River to hold the oil at bay.

But Voisin says the main problem is that customers are afraid.

“The brand for the seafood community is the biggest challenge that we’re faced with,” he says.

A recent survey of restaurants around the country conducted by Greater New Orleans Inc. shows just how bad the perception is. The economic development group’s president, Michael Hecht, says twice as many people now ask about the origin of seafood.

“The implication of course is they’re asking about whether it’s from the Gulf or whether it’s Louisiana seafood,” Hecht says.

He says 50 percent of people surveyed nationally now have an unfavorable view of Louisiana seafood. That’s a huge swing from a 73 percent favorable view before the spill.

They plan to fight back with a national ad campaign paid for with BP money.

The state of Alabama is already doing that with a new Serve the Gulf campaign.

Seafood Testing

The federal government is also trying to get the word out.

“Test results have been unequivocal. Gulf seafood is safe to eat,” says Eric Schwaab, head of fisheries at NOAA.

At the agency’s lab in Pascagoula, Miss., sensory analysts spend their days bending over Pyrex dishes and smelling the fish inside for the slightest whiff of oil.

Then they’ll have a taste. Seafood samples are also chemically analyzed for hydrocarbons and the dispersant BP sprayed on the oil slick. NOAA’s Walt Dickhoff says they’ve analyzed more than 5,000 samples and all have passed at margins 100 to 1,000 times below levels of concern.

“This is the most tested seafood in history. I’m completely confident it’s safe, it’s not contaminated,” Dickhoff says.

But others aren’t so convinced.

Continue at NPR

David Grunfeld / The Times-Picayune

If your idea of a good time involves consuming freshly shucked Louisiana oysters by the dozen, preferably with an elbow propped against a local raw bar, you’re no doubt happier today than you were in May or June of 2010.

Those were the dog-hard days of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, back when Louisiana oysters were so hard to come by that local oyster bars were shutting down and cutting back hours, oyster distributors were ceasing normal operations and traditional Louisiana seafood restaurants were turning to Oregon and Connecticut for their bivalves — or eliminating them from their menus entirely.

Nearly a year after the April 20 explosion aboard the BP oil rig that unleashed the spill, killing 11 people, the situation is much less dire, at least from the diner’s standpoint. (The story is more complicated for Louisiana oyster fishers and distributors, who are not out of the woods.) Raw bars are shucking all over town. Louisiana oysters have resumed their position as the norm — and when the oysters are not local, they almost certainly are comparable products from the coasts of Texas or Mississippi.

Granted, this news is not going to make all mouths water. Results of a recent study released by Greater New Orleans Inc. revealed that the spill still makes consumers uneasy about the safety of Gulf seafood. Of the 180 people who responded to a NOLA.com poll last week, 55 percent indicated they have yet to resume eating Gulf seafood of any kind since the disaster.

Continue at the TP