Escargot update
I crush snails daily in the test garden, but this whole escargot thing is really messing me up. It’s one thing to think of them as garden pests and to kill them right
away, but a whole other thing to raise them for food. I have much different standards.
I checked on the little guys over the weekend and felt so bad that we were starving them. They had clearly slowed down, and I felt like I was engaged in bizarre form of snail torture. I wanted the little buggers to be ok! So I cleaned them up and added a few teaspoons of cornmeal.
So far there have been two casualties, but the rest of the gang is still hanging in there.
At this point their systems are purged and they’re just being fattened up on the cornmeal. They are excreting nothing but white ribbons of cornmeal:
I’d starve by the time these snails were ready to eat. Other pests to consider eating: those rats that were invading the chicken coop… how did that go?
I like your comment about making the mental switch from thinking of snails as pests to thinking of them as food. I wrote about eating “pests” last year and mentioned snails, but only in passing. You might enjoy reading about how to catch, prepare, and eat your other garden and household pests. (http://chilechews.blogspot.com/2008/05/pestsand-how-to-eat-them.html)
Terrible. It’s one thing to protect your food crops, but this is just sickening.