Why the British should eat more oysters

Back when the dinosaurs still thought they were the bees-knees, another little creature was gently making its way into the big wide world. And now, more than 150 million years later – having withstood at least one planetary-wide annihilation (the one that knocked T-Rex off his perch) – the humble oyster may be on the cusp of making history itself.

That’s because this simple bivalve mollusc, cultivated on our shores since Roman times, really could help save the planet, albeit this time from an annihilation of man’s own making.

And here’s how: as most of are aware, we humans face two enormous challenges over the next 30 years: first, we have to prevent climate change from destroying the world as we know it; second, which is not entirely unconnected from the first, we need to work out how to feed sustainably the estimated 11 billion people that experts think will be living on Earth come 2050.

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