For at least 164,000 years, oysters have been part of the human diet, but people have been finding pearls in oysters for much longer — as early as 2300 BC when Chinese royalty received them as ...

Japanese pearl farmers reaped only 56.6 tons of akoya-grown pearls in 1996, down 22 percent from the 1993 harvest. Currently, production is just a quarter of what it was in 1995.

Pearl production, more readily associated with Polynesian atolls than the northern Mediterranean, has an annual global turnover of 11 billion dollars, and Italian oyster farmers are keen to cash in.

Where do pearls come from? Pearls are produced by marine and freshwater mollusks known as bivalves. Bivalve mollusks include oysters, mussels, clams, scallops and more.

A dozen oysters for $18.90 may seem a bit much, but it’s hard to find oysters like these, gleaming and silver in their half-shells, each with rich, distinctive flavors that not even a little ...

– There’s a pearl in my oyster: Unlikely, since pearls are produced by Meleagrina margaritifers, a mussel. Oysters will form a pearl-like object that lacks beauty and crumbles easily.

Unfortunately, the oysters that produce the pearls are sensitive creatures, needing constant care. It takes four years before the oysters produce their first black orbs.