A world without oysters?

Are oysters the sort of elitist, anachronistic foodstuff that should be consigned to history?
Oysters on ice
Oysters on ice. Photograph: Masashi Hayasaka/Getty Images/Amana Images RM

Tomorrow sees the start of the Whitstable Oyster Festival (July 24 to 30). If you're going, enjoy. You're welcome to it.

Personally, I have a distinct problem with the bivalve central to these celebrations: the oyster. Other Kentish foods are available, but any festival which celebrates the this most mystifying of molluscs is going to leave me cold. I. Just. Don't. Get. It.

Of course, I've heard chefs, fans and poetic sensualists talking up the raw oyster as a briny thrill ride, a saline shakedown, an orgasm from the ocean. Tracy Emin reckons she was once downing 100 a week and even the normally sober Harold McGee comes over rather giddy when discussing this "special delicacy" and its, "full, complex flavour and suggestively slippery moistness". Steady on, H.

Trouble is, I don't get any of the savoury complexity that McGee talks about. I just get what tastes like a gobful of seawater containing a large hunk of phlegm. It tastes less like sex and more like a practical joke. One hatched, perhaps, by those traditionalists who resent the rise of the Jamie Oliver classes. Well-lunched, well-heeled gourmets and whiskery food writers may tell us that liking oysters indicates a mature and sophisticated palate, but I'm not so sure. Could it be, in fact, that oysters are prized precisely because - like avant-garde electronica or Finnegans Wake - they are so challenging? Are they a genuinely sublime food or a conveniently difficult hurdle that separates 'them' (the serious, intrepid hardcore) and 'us'?

Any food which requires professional instruction before you eat it is by its very nature elitist. And if you haven't grown up around oysters, then you definitely need a little guidance before you tackle one. Try and slurp it down from the 'deep end' of the knobbly shell, and you'll struggle for a long, ungainly time to prise the bugger out. Make the fatal error of trying to chew on it - ha ha ... imagine! Trying to chew a piece of food! You peasant! - and you'll still be going as the waiters are putting the chairs on the tables at midnight. No, all you can do is, swallow. Hard. With luck, and a fair wind, you might get it down in one.

Once, in 60 Hope Street, a reasonably posh Liverpool restaurant, a friend of mine nearly took my eye out, involuntarily rejecting an oyster. It was like the Invisible Man was performing the Heimlich manoeuvre on her. There was very little amuse in that bouche.

Cooked oysters are less offensive, if hardly mindblowing. Nigel Haworth used to serve them as little deep-fried beignet with his Lancashire hotpot, an ironic reference to a time when oysters were cheap, plentiful and used to bulk out meat dishes. Raw, however, they remain a step too far. Even at the Fat Duck, with an iPod on and the the sound of the sea lapping in my ears they were still pretty gross.

In fact, oysters are just one of a whole pantheon of powerfully flavoured, supposedly luxury foods which I can take or leave. Champagne gives me heartburn; truffles remain an enigma (perhaps I can't smell the androstenone); and I often find foie gras overwhelming: too rich, too savoury, too buttery, too sweet. Too everything. A couple of mouthfuls of Hibiscus's foie gras ice cream; or Heston Blumenthal's jellied quail, creamed langoustine and foie gras parfait 'trifle', and I'm done.

I don't think it's just me, either. Such ingredients once formed a classical gastronomic canon that people aspired to. Nowadays, I think many people - and particularly younger foodies - find them overhyped and overpriced, if not downright inedible. As Tim Hayward observed in a WoM post about what he calls High End Restaurant Blowout Syndrome (HERBS), we're just not built to eat such rich food any more. We're not Regency rakes. We're not members of Louis XIV's court.

At the same time, the bland postwar British diet has, arguably, redefined our natural spectrum of taste, while the increased processing of food has led us to expect relatively precise, sharply defined, cleaner flavours. Truffles, oysters, foie gras and the like, particularly in the ways they have traditionally been used in haute cuisine, offer a level of flavour intensity, density and complexity which it is almost impossible to compute.

Which is not to say that I'm not interested in pronounced flavour or challenging myself. I am. But things, people and appetites change. Might it be time, therefore, to consider jettisoning those incredibly rich, intense gourmet foodstuffs? Would you miss oysters? Or, from sweetbreads and scallops to foie gras, do find yourself thoroughly nonplussed by food's elite ingredients?

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