To keep their business afloat during the pandemic, Jamie Bassett and Matthew Belson, owners of Shellfish Broker in Chatham, launched a CSA — and not the farm-to-table subscription for produce. It’s likewise the acronym for Community Supported Aquaculture and works similarly. Basset and Belson have years of commercial fishing experience and relationships with a wide net of local growers and harvesters, and sell mollusks and crustaceans to restaurants. But when restaurants shut down in March 2020, business dried up. “There are hundreds of oyster growers on the Cape, and their normal outlets were not available,” said Belson. So the two, with Mary Parks, introduced a CSA-style service, Shellfish Share. The company takes orders on the website and delivers oysters and littleneck clams monthly directly from Massachusetts harvesters to pickup points in Boston (Park Square and South End), Cambridge (Central Square), and Brookline (Coolidge Corner). The next pickup date is March 26. (In Chatham, it’s March 25.) You can purchase one month at a time. The share arrives in environmentally friendly beechwood mesh bags or packaging from the harvester. Each bears a traceability tag that tells you where the shellfish comes from, the grower, and the date they were plucked from the waters. Every month brings a different variety of bi-valve — perhaps Barnstable oysters from Scorton Creek, ones from the Nauset marsh close to the ocean, briny Wellfleets, and others — their flavor a result of their own merroir (like terroir that influences wine). “There’s a constant variety so people can try and compare,” said Bassett. “You won’t get it any fresher unless you harvest them yourself.” A bag of 20 oysters costs $33; 40 oysters, two varieties each, or 50 of one variety, both $63; A bag of 20 oysters and 25 clams, $63; and 50 clams, $41. To order and for pickup locations, go to shellfishshare.com.
ANN TRIEGER KURLAND