Giacomo Casanova, in the twelve volumes of his memoirs written at Dux Castle in Bohemia in the last decade of the eighteenth century, describes eating oysters in a specific way. He and his companion of the moment — the passage is from his time in Venice, the 1750s — are eating oysters by lamplight, passing them between themselves on the half shell in a game that is barely coded as what it is. An oyster slips. It falls onto the companion's chest. It must be retrieved. The scene is one of the most precisely observed pieces of erotic writing in European literature, and the oyster is not metaphor. The oyster is the point.
Whether Casanova actually ate fifty oysters at breakfast every morning — as he claims elsewhere, and as has been repeated in every newspaper account of his dietary habits for two hundred years — is a different matter. Fifty oysters is approximately three kilograms of food at a sitting, a quantity that strains credibility even for an eighteenth-century Venetian libertine with an enthusiastic appetite. The number almost certainly belongs to the self-mythologizing exuberance that characterizes his memoir throughout. What is not in doubt is that the oyster, for Casanova and for the culture that produced him, occupied a position in the imagination of desire that no other food approached.
The Aphrodisiac Question
The claim that oysters are an aphrodisiac is one of the most durable pieces of food mythology in Western culture, and it deserves a more careful examination than it usually receives. The short answer — the one that gets repeated in newspaper features — is that oysters are high in zinc, and zinc is essential to testosterone production, and therefore oysters might theoretically support libido by preventing zinc deficiency. A 2005 study by the American Chemical Society found elevated levels of D-aspartic acid and NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) in certain bivalves in early spring, compounds that in animal studies have been shown to influence hormone production. The researchers were appropriately cautious about extending these findings to human sexual behavior.
The longer answer is that the aphrodisiac mythology long predates any biochemical analysis and operates through mechanisms that have nothing to do with zinc. The Roman world — which consumed oysters in quantities that would not be matched again until the nineteenth century — associated them with Venus from the earliest period of their widespread cultivation, partly through the obvious visual suggestiveness of the shell form (Botticelli's Venus rises from a scallop, but the oyster and the scallop were sometimes conflated in antiquity), and partly through the oyster's association with the sea, the cold, and the elemental forces that Roman thought connected with eros.
Rome and the First Oyster Culture
The Romans did not merely consume oysters in large quantities. They built the first industrial-scale oyster aquaculture in European history. Sergius Orata — a Roman entrepreneur of the first century BCE whose name translates roughly as "Golden Gilt-Head Bream" — is credited with developing the first oyster cultivation system in the Lucrine Lake near Baiae on the Campanian coast, using artificial enclosures to maintain and fatten wild-harvested oysters. Baiae was the Roman equivalent of a luxury resort town: the summer destination of senators, generals, and emperors, famous for its thermal springs, its villas, and its appetite for every pleasure the empire could provide. That the first oyster farming in European history was developed to serve this particular community says something precise about the relationship between oysters and the imagination of luxury.
Roman oysters were transported live in barrels of seawater to Rome, to Gaul, to Britain — wherever the empire's network of roads and shipping lanes reached. The shells found in Roman archaeological deposits in London, Paris, and along the Rhine represent oysters that traveled hundreds of miles to reach their destinations, a logistical achievement requiring controlled temperature, humidity, and transit speed that prefigures modern cold-chain management by two millennia. The Romans understood that freshness was everything and invested accordingly.
The Oyster at the Table of Power
The association between oysters and power — not just desire but political and social power — runs through Western history with the same consistency as the aphrodisiac mythology, and the two are not unrelated. To serve oysters in quantity, in freshness, far from the sea, was always a demonstration of logistical reach and financial resource: the ability to make the perishable available at will. This was true in ancient Rome, where fresh Ostia oysters at a dinner in Milan signaled access to the imperial courier network. It was true in eighteenth-century Versailles, where Louis XIV's fondness for oysters was served by supply chains maintained at enormous expense across the French road system. It was true in nineteenth-century New York, where the ability to serve fresh Cape Cod or Baltimore oysters at a Manhattan dinner table required the infrastructure of the railroad age.
Casanova understood this. His memoir is a record of access — access to drawing rooms, bedchambers, and dinner tables that were normally closed to a Venetian of his origins. The fifty oysters at breakfast are not simply a dietary claim. They are a statement of arrival: I have arrived at a world where what I choose to eat is not constrained by what is available or what is appropriate. In the social semiotics of the eighteenth century, oysters at breakfast made a specific argument about who you were and what world you inhabited.
The Mythology's Use
The contemporary persistence of the oyster-as-aphrodisiac story — at raw bars, on menus, in the copy that accompanies every oyster-focused feature in a lifestyle magazine — is best understood not as a claim about biochemistry but as a cultural inheritance that is consciously maintained because it is useful. It gives permission. It frames the act of eating an oyster as an event that participates in pleasure rather than mere nutrition. It connects the person ordering at a raw bar tonight to Casanova by lamplight in Venice and to Roman senators at Baiae and to every other moment in Western history when the oyster was understood to belong to a world where life was being lived at its most intense.
This is what luxury food does at its best: it positions the eater in a continuous tradition of people who knew how to live. The mythology is the mechanism by which that positioning is accomplished, and the fact that the biochemistry is uncertain does nothing to diminish its effectiveness. As Casanova, who understood better than almost anyone the relationship between story and reality, would certainly have agreed.