What do you do when a pandemic hits, communities go into lockdown, restaurants close, and oyster growers shift their sales efforts to home cooks? You share some resources to help folks learn how to shuck and prepare the tasty bivalves in their own kitchens!
That’s how our Maryland Sea Grant “#ShuckatHome” video series came about at the start of stay-at-home orders for the COVID-19 pandemic a year ago — through a conversation with Aquaculture Extension specialists who were looking for ways to show consumers how easy it is to prepare and enjoy fresh, local shellfish at home. I gave the specialists tips on how to use their smartphones to record themselves in their own kitchens, they uploaded their “how to” clips onto a shared folder on Google Drive, then I created a custom opener and edited the pieces together into episodes. The videos are shared on YouTube channel and via our social media accounts.
I just took part in a session, The Sea Grant COVID-19 Response to the Needs of the Shellfish Industry, at the National Shellfisheries Association annual conference and presented on the series. See the abstract and video of that presentation below.
Here’s the latest episode of the series. The complete playlist can be viewed here.
2021 National Shellfisheries Association Annual Meeting, #Shellfish 21
Abstract: Taking public outreach into home kitchens: Stuck at home? #ShuckatHome!
Lisa D. Tossey & Shannon M. Hood
The rapid spread of coronavirus and the resulting lockdowns led to a host of challenges when it came to traditional approaches to public outreach. Widespread restaurant closures left oyster growers without the market where about 90 percent of their product is normally distributed. Consumers, eager to eat oysters, found themselves ill-equipped to open and prepare oysters in the home. With consumers, oyster growers, and Extension agents largely limited to the confines of their own homes in the Spring of 2020, Maryland Sea Grant Extension agents pivoted to a digital approach to showcase how the public could continue to enjoy oysters in their own home by sharing easy-to-follow preparation tips and recipes.
The team engaged a range of experts, including growers, extension specialists and students to demonstrate a variety of options for at-home oyster consumption. These included various shucking techniques, shuck-less methods, as well as recipe ideas well-suited to the home chef. Recorded using the technology growers and outreach specialists had on hand–smartphones–and produced by the program’s communications staff to have a consistent look and feel, the resulting ‘Shuck at Home’ series was planned so that episodes could be easily viewed across several social media platforms and YouTube. Optimizing the videos for this type of distribution allowed for a wider audience through social sharing and the use of targeted hashtags, as well as track shares and views through various platform analytics.
Here’s the video of that session: