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From: wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin )
Newsgroups: net.pets,net.garden,net.cooks
Subject: Re: raising snails
Message-ID: <2604@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 30-Oct-85 11:15:52 EST
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Posted: Wed Oct 30 11:15:52 1985
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One thing that I have not seen in the responses to the initial
snail-eating posting: Are domestic American garden-varieties of snails
safe to eat at all? Do they taste the same as the fancy French
varieties, which are, I believe, raised commercially as opposed to being
harvested from the wild? I would suspect that eating wild snails is
somewhat akin to eating wild mushrooms -- you can do it, and you may get
by OK, but you really shouldn't do it unless you know EXACTLY what you
are doing. Maybe the risks involved with mushrooms are far greater than
with snails -- hopefully, with the latter the only ill effect of eating
the wrong ones will be a poor-tasting dish and the waste of the other
ingredients. But I keep thinking of schistosomiasis (I spelled that
correctly BEFORE looking it up! Where's my prize? :-), and suchlike
snail-borne parasitic infections, and would hesitate to ingest an
"untested" snail.

(I have eaten snails, so this is not just unreasoning anti-snail fear.
I've had some that taste like mud, and others tht tasted great. Best
were in a little restaurant in Menlo Park, CA, called Le Pot-Au-Feu --
anybody know if it still exists?)

Will