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Food and drink: At a snail's pace

New food demands mean re-thinking old food supplies

With hunger on the rise worldwide for the first time in decades, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization is counting on increased agricultural aid along with improved agricultural crops - read, genetically modified crops - to feed the one in six people in the world who are undernourished.

Up until last year, steady gains had been made since the late 1960s in reducing the percentage of people suffering from chronic undernourishment. In light of this unfortunate reversal, it's high time to reconsider simple, seemingly unlikely sources of nutrition.

The first on the list is a bit of a sleeper, one with an impressive record in the history of humanity's systematic food systems, albeit one that's not immediately top of mind - the humble snail.

Raising snails and eating them - or escargots, if the term "snail" doesn't quite cut it for you - goes back eons. In fact, Felipe Fernández-Armesto in his wonderful book, Near Thousand Tables: A History of Food , posits that it may well have been the snail and other mollusks - not deer or other game - that were first herded and bred for food.

This, of course, is something like sacrilege amongst food historians who have traditionally painted a picture that it was the four-legged animals they hunted that early man first captured and bred to more easily put food, well, if not on the table, then at least in the pot.

While it's true this was commonplace, it may not have been the start of all creatures bred and small.

People living in the northeastern woodlands of pre-Columbian North America used fire to thin out trees to make it easier to hunt their game - turkey, elk, beaver, quail, grouse and porcupine. Similarly, aboriginal peoples in Australia used fire to herd kangaroos into pens and corrals for slaughter.

Some aboriginal people then learned to breed the penned animals for food. But Fernández-Armesto is quick to caution that we shouldn't presume this was an obvious progression, or the first step in the systematic production of animals for food. For one thing, not every group of people was into looking after animals full-time.

Others, like the ancient Inca, practised a kind of early selective breeding, releasing the best animals they hunted back into the wild to improve the stocks. Pretty much the reverse of what hunters today practise and pretty smart.

So where do snails fit in to the food supply chain? Fernández-Armesto points out that much evidence exists supporting the idea of snails as an early - if not the earliest - systematically bred food supply.

First, they're pretty easy to cultivate. Marine snails can simply be gathered in a rock pool, where they will essentially reproduce themselves. On land, you just need to dig a ditch around an area that's already a natural snail-breeding zone, et voilà you'll have a snail farm (or escargotière, in modern terms).

Early snail breeders would have quickly figured out they could get higher returns by picking out and tossing the smaller or less desirable critters so they couldn't reproduce.

While modern farmers feed their snails a careful diet of milky porridge and herbs, snails really don't need to be specially fed - they're basically grazers that can just munch along on the existing natural vegetation. Plus you don't need special techniques or equipment to harvest them.

Also, they don't exactly put one in grave danger when it's time to kill or capture them. No known records exist of humans dying of snail bites.

As far as nutrition goes, snails rank right up there. Some species are very high in water content, too. In ancient times, before coolers and freezer packs, such qualities would have made them highly desirable as portable, compact, nutritious snacks, perfect for pilgrimages, say along the ancient pilgrim routes in what is now Spain or France, or for waging war against marauders along distant enemy lines.

Given the above, wouldn't it make sense to re-consider snails as a practical, low-tech, ecologically-sound food supply? They certainly were in ancient times, for their shells provide obvious and irrefutable evidence that snails were once a popular food and likely one of the earliest animals bred.

According to Fernández-Armesto, mounds of snail shells from Paleolithic times are so huge and so common that it's pretty obvious the animals must have been farmed. The shells also indicate the snails were larger than those usually eaten today.

Further evidence of their popularity exists from ancient Roman times. Then, the ancestors of escargots de Bourgogne, the snails most of us eat today and the ones responsible for the popularization of escargots, were stuffed into cages and force-fed milk until they were too large for their shells.

While these were a luxury saved for the upper crust and for medicinal use, plenty more middens have been discovered in regions that comprised Mesopotamia to suggest that snails weren't just for the rich and famous of the ancient world.

Shell middens from ancient times in what is now Denmark also prove that the Danes have long been hands-down leaders when it comes to appreciating the beautifully simple solutions nature can provide.

These middens, however, contain more than snail shells. Oyster, cockle, mussel and periwinkle shells are the most common, reminding me of all the mollusks my husband and I ate while on a recent trip to southeastern France. One of the more impressive dishes we had was an ice bed of periwinkles so fresh they were still alive. One had to chase them across the ice to eat them, an easy hunt considering the cold really cramped their style.

Mollusk farming has also been popular throughout the ages beyond Denmark and Scandinavia. Concentrations of discarded shells can be found in many locations, including Scotland, the western shores of Europe, North America's Pacific coast, North Africa, Iberia and off the coast of Senegal, where discarded shells are so plentiful they actually form an island.

One of the beauties of mollusk farming is that it's so environmentally friendly. In fact oysters, bless their beautiful filter-feeding selves, enrich their environment, rather than deplete it.

With more than a billion undernourished people to feed, in addition to the exaggerated demands of the billion hyper-nourished people, like most of the readers and suppliers of this newsmagazine, including myself, I think we might be well-advised to take a tip from the ancients and push for simpler and more sustainable protein supplies.

More snail and oyster farms might be just the ticket as we look to feed more with less.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who prefers her mollusks cooked.