Julie Qiu - following the thread of curiosity

If you were to follow the simple thread of curiosity… where do you think it would take you?

Julie and I met in Palma De Mallorca, on a warm October. We were both there for food reasons, along with hundreds of other women attending the Parabere Forum.
Talking to her is refreshing, in a world where sparks of idea are rushed into business plans … Julie took it a step at a time: she planted the idea and watered it to see it grow into something she did not imagine at the start. Now the project is mature enough to give back to Julie and she doesn’t need to have two jobs to keep it going.

This is the story of how IN A HALF SHELL went from being a creative outlet to becoming an international oyster expert and developing the first course in the world for oyster sommeliers.

Julie and the oysters: How did this love affair come to be?

I think it was pretty organic, one thing led to another. Part it was the Universe telling me something and part I was being super curious - I really like to dive into different subjects.

Oysters just happen to capture my interest across the board: from the culinary standpoint and a sustainability standpoint to the culture around them. There’s a lot to unpack with the subject, I think I just became enamoured by all the different facets of the oyster world. 

Tracing back, I was born in Shanghai - where my family is from -  and Shanghainese cuisine is centred around seafood. So I remember eating a lot of shellfish and fish growing up. Then when we moved to the States we didn’t have much access to fresh seafood: I grew up in Indiana, which is landlocked. I guess seafood took a backseat for a little bit, but as a teenager, we used to visit my uncle who lives in San Diego and, being on the coast, they had great seafood. He took us to this wonderful seafood restaurant that was on a wharf, and that’s where I decided to try my very first raw oysters. I just remember liking some of them a lot and disliking others. I couldn’t understand why but that stuck with me until fast forward moving to New York.

Oysters were kind of everywhere at the time. It was very trendy in 2009/2010, every bar had an Oyster Happy Hour. So I decided to start journaling and blogging about my oyster adventure, just as a hobby, just to be curious. I also love taking photos and writing so it seemed a good creative outlet. 

And then I just started meeting people in the industry, and that was so fascinating to me because I didn’t know they were farmed, or that they taste different depending on where they come from. Moreover digging deep into the production of oysters and the supply chain, finally going out to the different farms, really that was it for me: the coolest thing! I loved sharing stories as a traveller as well or about travel and being in nature.

I guess it then spiralled into what it is now. I’m doing oyster masterclasses and I just launched The Oyster Master Guild, which is a new organisation that supports the advancement of oyster appreciation, recognising the people who do it well in the industry. I think there’s a lot to do in terms of consumer education, and making that role more professional and elevated: so you’re not just opening oysters but you’re telling a full story, you’re being stewards of the environment, you’re assuring our safety when we’re eating that raw/live animal… 

I was mind-blown when I met you and you told me that you “run a blog on oysters”... And since 2009!!! I mean, I couldn’t believe that you could come up with so much content about just one thing, about the oyster. 

Me too I was surprised at first, what could this lead to? Is there enough to say? And when you start to dig into it, oysters are one of our most ancient foods. We’ve been consuming them as a civilization for tens of thousands of years, so there’s a lot of history and culture about it around the world. When you look at it, you say ‘An oyster is an oyster, right?’ Yes and no. They do actually have a lot of nuance to them. I wonder if you could go down this rabbit hole with any food, I feel probably not. This one seems to be one of those that’s got so many stories, and it’s so intertwined with our environment and our economy as well. There is a lot to say, although I kind of put the blog aside for the moment to focus on The OMG. 

Have you thought of writing a sort of “Lonely Planet-style” book?

I’ve thought about it in the past and was even approached by multiple publishers to see if I wanted to write something. I just never found much interest in writing a book. The book is too static for me and I really like to keep up with the trends and stay up to date with what the latest and greatest is. So a book is a little bit limiting in that way, I prefer social media and video. That is to say, there are also great writers out there that have published books like that and I like to support them. 

I think part of me feels that I’m still midway through this adventure and I’m not ready to tell another story in book form. Many once I’ll retire somewhere and have a ranch full of sausage dogs!

How has this adventure impacted you as a person?

From a personal and professional stance, having a topic I feel confident and comfortable with has allowed me to become a public speaker which I never thought I would be. I don’t really like being in front of a crowd but when it comes to oysters, I feel so comfortable and so excited about it. Also being able to connect with different people around the world, I think that really enriched my life and my family’s life across the board. 

From a career standpoint, it did help me pivot from where I was - which was in advertising. I spent 10 years in advertising agencies doing account management and brand strategy, and I liked that work but the clients that we had were insurance and energy companies - it paid the bills but I wasn’t really passionate about it. At least the “In A Half Shell” blog allowed me to go down a path of exploring sustainable seafood and through that, I was able to get my full-time position as a Marketing Director of a sustainable seafood company. I don’t think I would’ve landed that position without having started a passion project on the side.

Now I’ve left that company, after working in it for 8 years, to start my own. So the whole project has developed organically into something that I really love doing and can probably live off of.

It’s very inspiring and positive to have such examples of projects which took time to develop and blossom into something like a business that can sustain itself, and you. Nothing happens overnight anyway. There seems to be a rush today, perhaps given the pressure of social media, to make things successful and profitable from day one… and well, I find it’s about a long marathon rather than a sprint. Yours took 10+ years of refinement, I believe.

I remember when I first thought of turning “In A Half Shell” from a hobby into something that could make money, it was a lot of trial and error, to be honest. I didn’t know what the business model would look like, what people are willing to pay for, what they perceive as valuable, what they see as interesting - that takes a lot of time! Especially in an experiential service area. But it’s been fun.

Ultimately, I’ve been able to design a job for myself that relies on my strengths in my profession as a strategist and also as a creative person, but also it speaks to my personal interest in oysters and food and seafood.

I think it does take a while to develop self-confidence in creating something new and making it feel like this is actually something valuable in the industry and should be respected within the industry versus just something that you do on the side.

Have you ever felt like you were writing and releasing your content but not getting the expected engagement? How did you manage your expectations?

A little bit here and there. I don’t think I ever published something that didn’t get a reaction, I mean sometimes it wasn’t big but in a way, I knew it’s a very niche topic. I think I realised I’d rather find the people who are really truly interested in this and connect with them, rather than trying to reach the masses. 

I think it was just potentially doing different types of events and maybe not getting the reception that I was expecting. Even if it was a dozen people or half of that, it’s still cool to be able to convert individuals one at a time versus speaking to the masses. And I think that’s actually a realisation I had with Oyster Master Guild, which is you can’t talk to everybody at the same time, they’re all at different places, they value different things and are influenced I suppose by different kinds of people. So what I was trying to achieve with OMG is give people the tools that I have, and I may not necessarily reach everybody but at least I can give people the tools if they want to do what I’m doing, that they can do it. 

Because right now there’s no formal path to becoming an Oyster Sommelier. I get this question asked a lot: How do you become one? Well, you can follow my path or we can put together a course that shows you how to do all the fundamentals and here are all the things that you need to start the journey that way.

So are you saying that all the Oyster Sommeliers or oyster connoisseurs out there are all self-taught? 

Yes, there’s no program, no formal program. I coined that term myself because it was the easiest way to explain to people what I’m doing I’m doing…

And it makes a lot of sense…

Yeah I think so, and I’m not the only one with this idea, I found many people around the world who also come to the conclusion that there should be a formal organisation that supports this type of education and certification. So that’s where I got after 14 years of diving into the oysters, and we decided to form such an entity after 6 or 7 years of talking about it in our heads. It’s in place and the reception has been amazing so far.

I love when something so obvious that should’ve existed for a while now, was never created. I guess that’s when you can tell it was somehow meant to be your doing…

It’s a good feeling to know that people are finding it valuable. When I was in Spain in April, there was a global seafood expo in Barcelona and I had the opportunity to catch up with my mentors in the industry, they’re just extremely seasoned consultants in the seafood space. I pitched the idea to them and they encouraged me saying it’s a fantastic idea and that I should definitely do it. Those are people who don’t sugarcoat things so if they think something would work, they just tell you… and that was super encouraging and motivating. 

What’s the difference between wild and farmed oysters?

Around the world, scientists have deemed most global oyster reefs functionally extinct. They are not nearly as abundant as they have been historically. Over-harvesting, the development of our coastal areas, and pollution combined have created so much stress on the wild oysters that they don’t flourish in the same way. That said there are still some places where you can find wild oysters, and there where you can’t find them anymore that’s when the oyster farms come into play. 

The benefit of an oyster farm is that you can put it in place and it actually serves similar functions as a wild oyster reef. There’s not much difference in taste - it might be tastier than a farmed oyster because they tend to be really pampered. Oysters are filter feeders, so a farmed oyster would eat the same algae as a wild one. 

What kind of environment does a farm occupy versus a wild reef?

Wild oysters tend to be in an intertidal zone, and farms as well. Oysters really thrive in areas where salt water meets sweet water - but environment-wise, wild oysters just sort of “hang out” either as reefs or as individuals on the sea floor. You typically leave them alone until they reach market size, at which point a harvester would go pick them up. 

Farm oysters, nowadays rely on quite a bit of equipment to contain the oysters in bags or kind of like mesh edges. Every oyster farm is different in how they approach farming, but you can bring the farms in other areas too like deep water where you suspend the oyster cages on the surface of the water - that’s not where a wild oyster would be.

However, they both are reliant on Mother Nature. There’s a lot more labour that goes into farming oysters than on harvesting wild ones, obviously. From a global standpoint, China dominates oyster farming but most of their oysters stay in the country for domestic consumption, whereas in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia there are more imports/exports happening. 

I assume oysters are not an everyday food, to have such huge production without exporting them… What’s the oyster culture in China?

I imagine most of the oyster production goes into the making of the oyster sauce. There’s very little raw oyster consumption in China, the half-shell is also very unfamiliar. If you were to have oysters in China, they get really expensive - I remember years ago In Shanghai, going to an oyster bar, each oyster was like 10-12 USD. So it’s definitely luxury food, but they produce enough so you can find oysters just as a simple ingredient. That’s kind of like it’s been historically when the supply was much more plentiful, so you find different people having oysters as part of their protein intake. 

It’s a luxury food now because the price is a reflection of the amount of labour that goes into the market. Besides the price barrier, for food to become an everyday food, there need to be some cultural changes to happen. Americans for example don’t eat much seafood, and of what they eat there are 4 seafoods that rule. So one would need to understand and make an effort to incorporate a food like oysters into his lifestyle. Perhaps I think more of mussels in that way, they are definitely more versatile, cheap and tasty. Someone else will figure it out, I’m sure.

Be Bivalve Curious here.