Escargot are one of my favorite foods at French restaurants. However, after reading Tim Flannery’s review of “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” by Elizabeth Tova Bailey in the NY Review of Books, I may stop eating them.
Bailey became interested in snails when she was laid low by a mysterious disease and could do very little while she lay in bed most of the day. A friend brought her violets among which was a single snail. That snail had a positive influence on Bailey’s approach to her health problems. From the review you can see why, as snails appear to be fascinating creatures.
For example, the snail would not touch sandy soil that was placed in the flowerpot residence of the snail. It wanted the sand gone and its old soil back. It was able to move over mosses without bending them. It practiced good grooming.
Bailey’s readings revealed other fascinating facts:
“they possess a sword-like tongue with around 2,640 teeth. Their tentacles, she learned, have eyes at their tips and are expressive of mood, either drooping with dismay or becoming turgid with alertness. The Chinese characters for “snail” read as “slime cow”—and slime, as Bailey writes, “is the sticky essence of a gastropod’s soul.” When a snail wants to move it secretes “pedal mucous,” which the ripple of its foot muscle momentarily transforms from solid to liquid, so aiding its progress. So adherent is the substance that the nineteenth-century naturalist E. Sandford showed that a snail can hoist fifty-one times its own weight up a window blind using its pedal mucous. But pedal mucous is just one of many kinds of slime snails produce. If harmed, snails can even secrete a medicinal slime that will protect them from infection.”
Most interestingly, there are not male and female snails. All snails are hermaphrodites, i.e., each snail has both male and female characteristics so that all snails can fertilize themselves if they so choose. Bailey’s snail produced over 100 baby snails.
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