The Glorious, Global Oyster.

I just spent a week in Washington state eating thumb-sized Penn Cove oysters and Bowes that were two-thirds the size of my fist.

Slimy bliss.

If you, too, love the sweet and briny tang of this lowly mollusk, then get your hands on a copy of the August issue of Travel & Leisure and flip to page 127.

Peter Jon Lindberg has spent three years traveling the world in search of the best specimens.

His rhapsodic prose in "The World Is My Oyster" will delight you. (No link online, buy a copy at a newsstand).

A sample: "Perhaps it's their shells, the contours mimicking the landscapes they inhabit, craggy coastlines in miniature. Perhaps it's their pungent, briny liquor, crashing like surf across the tongue....Knocking one back is like mainlining the cove it came from."