Elizabeth Peeples and Stefanie Bassett had been working in New York City for 17 years—Peeples in interior design, Bassett in advertising—when they decided to move to Long Island’s North Fork and become oyster farmers. The way they tell it, their journey began with a Groupon for a “very boozy shucking class in Greenpoint.” Participants were invited to eat as many oysters as they could shuck. “I did about two,” Bassett says. Now she can shuck 200 in half an hour.
At the class, they heard about the environmental impact of oysters—as filter feeders, they improve water quality wherever they live—and were inspired to learn more. They would bring books like Shucked to Aquagrill in Soho, sampling oysters while reading about how to harvest them. Neither one had ever driven a boat before, but they felt called to the coast.
In 2018, the couple took over a hobby farm on the east side of Shelter Island in Gardiners Bay, which gives their bivalves direct access to the Atlantic—“that’s the crisp taste you might’ve noticed with our oyster,” Peeples explains—and sets them apart from the other oyster farms in the area. (Most others are located in the Peconic Bay.) Little Ram Oyster Co. has a couple of other distinguishing features: First, that it’s run by two women, a rarity in the fishing and aquaculture industries where women’s labor tends to be less visible and valued than men’s. They employ three other women. “We love getting more women on the water,” Bassett says.
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