“Modern nutritionists estimate that for a diet of oysters to furnish the caloric intake necessary for good health,” Mark Kurlansky writes in “The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell” (Ballantine Books, 320 pages, $23.95) “an individual would have to eat about 250 oysters a day.” Many readers will immediately begin to calculate the feasibility of 250 a day – would it be better to eat them steadily throughout the day, or to eat 83 oysters at breakfast in one sitting? It’s a thrilling proposition either way.

If you don’t have the constitution for the 250-a-day regimen, you can enjoy vicariously as Charles Dickens, just one of many cameo appearances, steps up to the plate in your stead. Mr. Kurlansky quotes him: “I cannot refrain from one, I fear rather sentimental, allusion to the oyster cellars of New York. In no part of the world have I ever seen places of refreshment so attractive.” When the young writer, already a superstar, visited New York, the first banquet held in his honor (the so-called Boz Ball) was catered by Downings, a premier New York oyster house. At a second banquet:

The first course consisted of three soups, including oyster ‘potage,’ and fish – trout, bass, and shad – all products of the Hudson River. The second course offered six different cold dishes, including oysters in aspic, as well as roasted sirloin, saddle of mutton, goose, veal, turkeys, capons – note the plural – and a choice of five boiled meats, including boiled turkey with oyster sauce.

Oyster pies hit the board for the entree, as well. Dickens was in New York, after all, and New York oysters were famous and delicious. They were shipped to London and Paris (both oyster towns themselves), and all across America.

“The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell” regales with numerous instances of frying, stewing, roasting, and slurping from the oyster cellars of the famed Five Points slum to the swank dining rooms of the Delmonico. New Yorkers ate staggering quantities. Dozens upon dozens. “Who would dream at stopping at a half dozen? A few dozen was a nice appetizer,” Mr. Kurlansky writes. He notes that the recipe for pickled oysters in the 1851 edition of “Directions for Cookery” begins, “Take a hundred and fifty fine large oysters …”

Could New York supply them all? Were there “enough oysters in New York Harbor to feed the world”? At first, oysters from the harbor were not only desirable but also plentiful, and the city seemed able (and more than willing) to feed the world half shells. Mr. Kurlansky quotes from Adriaen van der Donck’s mid-17th-century book “Description of the New Netherlands”: “There are some people who imagine the animals of the country will be destroyed in time, but this is an unnecessary anxiety.”

And if nature let them down, science would come to the rescue. One French naturalist had harvested 16 million oysters from 500 acres of bed, after all.

But these hopeful figures couldn’t have predicted the effluvia of industry. Rapacious eating and enthusiastic pollution spelled the end of the New York oyster. Mollusks can filter, but they cannot overcome the PCBs and heavy metals found in New York Harbor.

Overfishing and mismanaging have a long history. Mr. Kurlansky starts his story with the oyster shell piles (middens) of the Lenape Indians, which mark “the oldest evidence of humans ever found in the Hudson Valley.” The Dutch wrote home with tales of oysters the size of dinner plates, and “On the bottom [of the middens] the very largest ones, described as ‘giant oysters,’ measure eight to ten inches.”

In the middens, the shells get smaller as one looked closer to the top, evidence of overfishing from the get-go. (Though it’s difficult to relish the idea of eating a 10-inch oyster with a knife and fork.)

Mr. Kurlansky raises a poignant question about New York’s oysters:

Though [New Yorkers] live by the sea, they take vacations to go somewhere else to be by the sea. Of the many odd things about New Yorkers, there is this: How is it that a people living in the world’s greatest port, a city with no neighborhood that is far from a waterfront, a city whose location was chosen because of the sea, where the great cargo ships and tankers, mighty little tugs, yachts, and harbor patrol boats glide by, has lost all connection with the sea, almost forgotten that the sea is there? New Yorkers have lost their oyster.

Mr. Kurlansky believes man’s separation from nature is responsible. “New Yorkers have long regarded their city as unnatural, in contradiction to nature,” he writes. “They talk of leaving the city ‘to see some nature.’ Perhaps it is not just unnatural but a threat to nature.”

There are few bodies of water more abused than New York Harbor, the Hudson, and the various creeks and inlets around the city. But it is specious to assume that we would do less harm if we were all living on 3-acre plots in the Great Plains, heating individual houses, and driving everywhere. We have done a poor job at stewarding that which we might like to keep around, such as oysters. It is not because we live outside of nature, but rather – and this becomes more evident with every turn of the page – because we are too easily seduced by our own.

Mr. Watman last wrote for these pages about Norman Mailer.