Watching Gordon Ramsay’s F Word show tonight, I saw how he caught, cooked and ate garden snails. In this world of economic worries (and my own love of apocalyptic stories), eating garden snails doesn’t sound like a bad plan. I thought the whole thing of farming garden snails was something fairly new until I started looking online. The farming of snails is called heliculture.
Have you eaten snails? Does snail farming sound like a career change you could get into? Would be pretty cheap, all your livestock would be free for the finding. They don’t eat a lot, compared to the typical farm animals. The main care is changing the water in their tank or jar (depending on how many snails you keep). It could be a booming industry, if you can find enough people who just love eating snails.
What else could you turn into an almost unknown or never heard of farming opportunity? How about all those pigeons flying around cities? Forget training them to send messages just cook them!
A little trail of links, to be clicked slowly:
Eating Garden Snails from GardenGeek
The Food Blog: Snail Spaghetti Recipe
The Alternative Farming Systems Information Center: Raising Snails
Eating Garden Snails – an abandoned blog based on a radio show.
Giving it a Go: Snail Farm (snails caught and kept to feed backyard chickens).
Snail Farming Information Service, Australia.
Landline: Snail Farmers
Landscape Juice: Heliculture
Flickr: Snail / Chiocciola / Escargot / Caracol / Cargol / Schnecke
Flickr: Garden Snails
Flickr: Snail Garden
I might try a snail but I like salt on my food.
So that doesn’t quite work.
It seem’s like a lot of effort (preparation etc) for little return. I’d be happy to try them but I don’t think I’d make it a regular thing.