Jules Melancon, a third-generation Louisiana oysterman who, moderately than giving up after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill ravaged the Gulf Coast, discovered an modern, sustainable and far tastier technique to convey his briny delicacies to New Orleans eating places, died on Aug. 31 at his residence in Reduce Off, La. He was 65.
His father, Loyman Melancon, stated the trigger was metastatic most cancers.
Mr. Melancon spent most of his life farming oysters the old style approach, working a dredge throughout the underside of the shallow, brackish waters of the decrease Mississippi River Delta. He captained his personal 65-foot steel-bottom boat, My Melanie, named for his spouse and returned each night sagging beneath the load of the day’s catch.
It was backbreaking work. In his prime, the ursine Mr. Melancon would lug two 120-pound sacks of oysters onto a truck. However it was profitable, too: He’d promote 400 of these baggage in a day, at as much as $15 a bag, to canneries and wholesalers that shipped worldwide.
The great days didn’t final. By the tip of the Nineteen Nineties, rising sea ranges, air pollution and erosion have been driving down the oyster inhabitants and making the delicate area susceptible to storm harm.
“We began feeling it earlier than Katrina, that the oysters have been on the downhill,” Mr. Melancon informed The Morning Information, a web based journal, in 2015. “After which after Katrina, it form of phased out the oysters, about two-thirds of them, after which in 2008 the oysters began coming again sturdy, after which we had the BP spill.”
That oil spill, from the Deepwater Horizon rig within the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, coated the Louisiana coast in tens of millions of gallons of crude.
Nonetheless younger sufficient to discover a new job on land, Mr. Melancon was getting ready to quitting when a buddy, Jim Gossen, who owned one of many Gulf Coast’s greatest seafood wholesalers, informed him a couple of new kind of oyster farming being examined by Auburn College researchers close to Cell, Ala.
As a substitute of dredging, farmers grew spats, or immature oysters, from pinhead-size seeds in drums on land. When the oysters have been the dimensions of 1 / 4, they went into chicken-wire cages suspended in shallow water.
Wild oysters may take 5 years to succeed in full dimension; with this new method, exposing them to a wealthy move of vitamins, they wanted lower than 10 months. And so they have been excellent: huge and meaty, with photogenic shells that regarded excellent on a uncooked bar.
“There’s a higher stage of care and tending,” William Walton, who ran the Auburn program and is now on the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, stated in a telephone interview. “It’s extra equal to a microbrew.”
In 2014, Mr. Melancon obtained Louisiana’s first different oyster tradition license. Quickly he was trucking the oysters on to famed New Orleans eating places like Brennan’s and Pêche.
They have been successful. In her ebook “Think about the Oyster” (1941), the meals author M.F.Ok. Fisher wrote that “American oysters differ as a lot as American folks.” However that wasn’t actually the case on the gulf: Whereas oyster followers are used to hyperlocal varieties from the East Coast like Damariscottas and Wellfleets, these from the gulf had no such provenance, going by the generic identify of Gulf Coast oysters and sure for soups, frying pans and cans.
Mr. Melancon modified all that. Out of the blue he was providing names like Beauregard Islands, Champagnes and Queen Besses, pulled from totally different corners of his watery farming grounds, every with its personal nuanced flavors.
“Jules was a pioneer,” the New Orleans restaurateur Dickie Brennan stated.
Mr. Melancon did nicely financially, however solely comparatively. Regardless of the rising renown of his oysters — he shipped to eating places as far-off as Seattle — he was typically simply scraping by, making a fraction of what he had made prior to now. Hurricane Ida, in 2021, set him again, as did a severe again harm he sustained whereas making an attempt to repair his storm-damaged roof.
Nonetheless, by taking a threat on a brand new twist on a centuries-old observe, Mr. Melancon confirmed his fellow oyster farmers that there may nonetheless be a future for his or her vanishing lifestyle. As we speak there are dozens of comparable efforts throughout the coast, Dr. Walton stated.
“Once you meet anyone that tries to be the perfect at what they do, I don’t care if he’s a ditch digger,” Mr. Gossen stated by telephone. “There’s a sure aura about them once they wish to be the perfect.”
Jules Chris Melancon was born on March 22, 1958, in Reduce Off, a bayou group about 25 miles south of New Orleans. He grew up bilingual, talking Cajun French at residence, as a part of a vibrant, tight-knit group that will quickly fade over his lifetime.
Alongside together with his father, he’s survived by his mom, Mamie Lee (Aeymard), a homemaker; his spouse, Melanie (St. Pierre) Melancon; and his sisters, Patti Barrios, Wendy Dodge, Tina O’Neal and Suzette Esbonge.
Mr. Melancon attended Nicholls State College in Thibodaux, La., after which transferred to Delgado Group Faculty in New Orleans, however left earlier than graduating.
Whereas attending faculty he labored on his father’s oyster boat on the aspect, however he later determined to attempt one thing else. He went to work on a Shell oil rig in 1980, simply because the home oil increase was starting. He rose rapidly; by 25 he was managing a number of rigs. However lax security requirements and fixed publicity to poisonous chemical compounds drove him again to the oyster boat.
In 1983 he labored together with his father and uncles for a spell; once they retired, he took over the enterprise.
The very best half about oystering, he stated in a 2015 oral historical past interview for Baylor College, was “about being free.” “After I go farming,” he stated, “once I stand up, to me, it was once for the peace and tranquillity. Within the morning, to see that solar rise — and I’d be on the market early, farming my oysters.”
However then all that modified.
“Now all the pieces is extra polluted,” he stated. “And the land’s not going to be the identical, and it’s not going to get higher.”
