Eaten & Eating
The Romans, who were addicted to snails, grew them on ranches where they were fed special foods like bay, wine, and spicy soups to preseason them.
—Rombauer & Becker
These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind,
And the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole.
—The Bible (Leviticus 11:29-30)
The edible snails of France are unlike the bivalves in that they do not live in or near water, but on land, where they dine upon grape leaves and other greens in the vineyards of Southern France. Could it be they are wine-flavored?
Throughout the summer the snails gorge themselves, then in a stuffed and lazy condition they hibernate during winter. After the grape harvest snails are searched for and gathered in their dormant stage and either eaten fresh (in France) or canned for year round enjoyment. The job of cleaning snails is tedious and long.
—Alma S. Lach
"I am looking for snails," she muttered. "I hope this doesn't bother you." I looked down and saw the torn old burlap bag in which she was carrying the snails she had gathered. Of course, the rain! Snails always appeared in numbers after it rained, clinging to the underside of the plants' leaves.
—Richard Goodman
I am not a vegan (I will eat eggs and dairy), because eggs and milk can be coaxed from animals without hurting or killing them—or at least so I thought. I am also willing to eat animals without faces, such as mollusks, on the theory that they are not sufficiently sentient to suffer.
--Michael Pollan
To Prepare Snails—Select snails which are closed and with a knife remove the calcerous* membrane covering the opening of the shell. Wash the snails well in a few changes of water and then place them in a container with coarse salt, some vinegar and a pinch of flour. Allow them to disgorge themselves for approximately 2 hours then rewash well in plenty of cold water so as to remove all traces of mucous. Cover with water and simmer for 5-6 minutes.
—A. Escoffier
*Calcerous—Made of limestone, chalky
The second [dish] arrived in a flower pot, filled with malted, roasted rye crumbs and holding shoots of raw wild vegetables, a tiny poached mousse of snail nestling in a flower, and a flatbread "branch" that was spiced with powdered oak shoots, birch, and juniper.
—Jane Kramer
[The snail kite] will sometimes capture a small turtle or other creature, but their slow flight, slender talons and sickle-shaped bills—which fit perfectly inside the shell of a snail—are adapted to catching and eating this one particular prey. In fact, an adult kite will eat as many as 50 apple snails a day. After plucking one from the water and settling onto a perch, a kite can use its sharp-tipped bill to extract the snail and devour it in less than 90 seconds.
—Doreen Cubien
Bright moon;
pond snails hissing
in the saucepan.
—Basho
Molluscs, from the viewpoint of a human predator, are small packages of meat sealed in heavy inedible shells. In terms of energy efficiency, this fact sets definite limits on the distance live molluscs will be transported in quantity with simple technologies; beyond these limits, energy expended in transport will exceed that gained from the food.
—Gregory A. Waselkov
Snails are relatively easy to cultivate. The escargots de Bourgogne, the variety most esteemed in recent times, are bred in escargotières and carefully fed on choice herbs and milky porridge. They are an efficient food, self-packaged in a shell which serves at table as a receptacle for the garlic butter with which the dish is usually sauced. The waste is small, the nutrition excellent.
—Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Contemporary Westerners tend to associate insects with filth, death, and decay, and, because some insects feed on flesh, their consumption is often seen as cannibalism by proxy. [Vincent M.] Holt takes pains to stress that the insects he recommends for eating—caterpillars, grasshoppers, slugs—are pure of this taint.
—Dana Goodyear
Milk-Fed Snails:
6 edible snails per person
2 pints (1.1 litres) milk
salt
1 tsp (5ml) anchovy essence
1 tbsp (15ml) wine
Clean the snails with a sponge and remove the membranes so that they can come out of their shells. Put in a vessel with half the milk and salt for 1 day, then in a fresh vessel with the remaining milk for 1 more day, cleaning away the excrement every hour. When the snails are fattened to the point that they cannot return to their shells, fry them in oil. Serve with a dressing of anchovy essence and wine.
—Jane Renfrew
Much of the preparation relies on fermentation, common in cuisine from southern Guangxi province where the noodles first began. Their malodorous* reputation also makes snail noodles quite possibly one of the worst meals to make at home: The smell of the pickled toppings and the stewed snails can linger for hours.
—Emily Feng
*smelly
… under the canvas
of a Venetian café, the snails converse
about eternity.
—Adam Zagajewski
In addition to being eaten, snails have also in the past figured importantly in trade. Snail shells have provided the “money” of various races, including the “wampum” of American Indians.
—John B. Burch
Many mollusks (snails in particular) feed with organs called radulae. A radula works like a cross between a cat's tongue and a chain saw. The flexible, horny structure goes in and out rasping food from a surface and carrying it mouthward. Hard denticles* on the radula do the rasping, and some of these contain a lot of metal.
—Steven Vogel
*Denticles—Tiny teeth
Many kinds of living animals graze algae; some kinds of snails specialize in rasping at algae with their spiky jaws. You can see such small snails sliding over rocks and glass in fish tanks, polishing away the algae and bacteria they feed upon, incessantly clearing away their food, much as an obsessively house proud individual might run over and over a small flat looking for specks and crumbs.
—Richard Fortey
Fate and my parents shaped me like a snail,
day and night wandering marsh weeds that smell foul.
Kind sir, if you want me, open my door.
But please don't poke up into my tail.
—Ho Xuan Huong
But then, there came the she-crab named Railroad Tie. The biggest, most awesome specimen of Carpillus maculatus in Vermeij's collection was nicknamed for the heavy log needed to bar the lid of her aquarium against her escape. Railroad Tie had never met a snail she couldn't break. In the marquee event of [Geerat] Vermeij's Coliseum, the unstoppable offense of railroad Tie was pitted against the drum-tight defense of Drupa morum. On meeting the impenetrable mollusk, the big crab with her extraordinary right claw by-passed the customary perimeter assaults on the snail's rim. Her claw enveloped the entire shell of Drupa. She started squeezing with a force of some twelve hundred pounds of pressure.
—William Stolzenburg
Founded by Carlo Petrini in Orvieto, Italy, in 1986, Slow Food (alimento lento) is the long overdue response to dead food, processed food, fast food, agribusiness, Unilever, Nestle, and General Foods … The logo for the movement is the snail, an “amulet of exasperation.”
—Paul Hawken
[W]hen the snails eat, they feast, filling their digestive tract with a glut of battered bodies in various states of drug-induced disarray. Depending on the snail species at hand, some of the corpses might be fish, limp from hypoglycemic* shock; they could be worms, sexually stimulated and hot to trot. These poor souls are among the many victims of cone-snail venom—one of the deadliest and most dizzyingly complex substances ever described in an invertebrate.
—Katherine J. Wu
*hypoglycemic—a low blood sugar count
If snails come across a carcass, they tend to wait until the other scavengers have had their fill of flesh and then nibble at any exposed bones. It is as if they instinctively know that the calcium that the bones contain will be good for their shells.”
—Tamara Green
In most animals and even some sea slugs, autotomy* is thought to serve only as a means of avoiding predation. But the researchers found evidence that it can also be used to expel internal parasites. All of the Elysia atroviridis that separated their heads had internal parasites, according to the researchers. And by ditching their infested bodies, they successfully expelled them, regenerating parasite-free forms.
—Annie Roth
*Self-eating
Even shellfish were overexploited [on Easter Island], so that people ended up eating fewer of the esteemed large cowries and more of the second-choice smaller black snails, and the sizes of both cowry and snail shells in the middens decreased with time because of the preferential over-harvesting of larger individuals.
—Jared Diamond
Meanwhile, as the size of the catch has fallen, so, too, has the size of the creatures being caught. This phenomenon, which has become known as "fishing down the food web," was first identified by Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist at the University of British Columbia … Pauly follows this trend to its logical—or, if you prefer, illogical—conclusion. Eventually, all that will be left in the oceans are organisms that people won't, or can't, consume, like sea slugs and toxic algae.
—Elizabeth Kolbert
At the back was the moat in which Roger Deakin* bathed most days during the summer months, and which was kept clean by a colony of thousands of ramshorn snails—the hygenists of the pond world.
—Robert Macfarlane
*Roger Deakin—British environmentalist, d. 2006