For most of its history, Texas has been an oyster-eating state that couldn’t grow its own. The Gulf of Mexico runs along 367 miles of Texas coastline, and for decades the wild oyster beds out there fed the rest of the country — enormous, creamy, deeply flavored bivalves that bore no resemblance to the delicate East Coast varieties sitting on ice at the better raw bars in Dallas. But farming them? That was illegal. Texas was, until 2019, the last coastal state in the country that hadn’t legalized cultivated oyster mariculture. Every state on the Atlantic, every state on the Pacific, even Louisiana and Mississippi and Florida — all permitted. Texas: no.
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