Visit Chesapeake Bay Journal September 2012:

Just offshore from the new CBF center, against a backdrop of heavy traffic streaming along Shore Drive across Lynnhaven Inlet, Chris Ludford pulls up his aquaculture cages and offers for the shucking a few choice Lynnhavens from his small oyster farm. He’s one of several oyster farmers at work on the river now, planting millions of bivalves annually.

Ludford’s oysters are tonic to the palette, so fat and firm one wants to describe them as crisp. A strange term for a slithery invertebrate, but I am upheld by famous foodie MFK Fisher in her classic, 1941 book, “Consider the Oyster”: “for me one of the pleasures of eating a raw oyster is the crispness of its flesh.”

Prices on the wall of a local seafood shop tell the bottom line: James River oysters, $6 a dozen; Seasides from Virginia’s Atlantic Bays, $6; Lynnhavens, $11.