Jonathan Swift wasn't whistling Dixie when he wrote that.

Franklin County, Fl. has historically harvested 90 percent of the state's oysters and 10 percent of the nation's. More than 1,000 people in the county make their living in the oyster business. To give you a sense of quantity, in recent years the U.S. oyster haul has been roughly 30 million pounds of meat--about 75 percent of that eastern oysters, or Crassostrea virginica, the species that is shown off to finest effect in Apalachicola. Currently, a number of things threaten the Florida oysters. Some is bad press: A few years ago the local oyster economy took a serious hit (35 percent off in sales) when two oyster-related deaths were reported in Florida. The culprit: vibrio vulnificus, a bacterium naturally present in marine environments that is dangerous to those with compromised immune systems. (New technology called post-harvest processing has just been developed to safeguard against vibrio vulnificus bacteria, kind of like pasteurization.)

The second, even more serious, is drought in Georgia to the north. Reduced water flows down the Apalachicola River mean saltwater encroachment upriver into the estuaries, where the gulf seafood spawns. Some estimates put the Apalachicola oysters at half dead right now due to lack of fresh water, with the east and west ends of Apalachicola Bay the hardest hit. Let’s hope this $134 million-a-year regional industry can bounce back.

There's not absolute consensus about where the best easter oysters are from, which is why on April 7 at the Westin Hotel in Providence, R.I. (my place of birth), the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association is holding a great oyster competition. They're bringing in celebrity chefs (including David Carrier of Apalachicola's Avenue Sea), restaurateurs and writers to judge 20 varieties of Eastern oysters from all three coasts. I'll let you know who wins.