Snail Season

For me, the turn of late spring into summer heralds the arrival of my favorite fruits: raspberries, blueberries, nectarines, cherries. Meanwhile, Andalucians get excited about the advent of a different seasonal food: snails. Come late May, the little creatures can be seen scaling walls, burrowed in the folded leaves of every plant, and hiding in the produce section of any grocery store. Their prevalence begs the question of why anyone would bother buying them instead of blindly sticking a fist into nearby greenery and drawing out a meal's-worth. But there they are, the snail-sellers, standing at street corners with plastic tubs of their captives millimetering toward freedom. Broken shells and the flattened grayish goo of snail bodies on the sidewalk stand as a testament to the doomed future that awaits crawlaways.

To be honest, the sight of few hundred ugly brown shells with their corresponding oozy gray inhabitants does not especially whet my appetite. Perhaps to combat this rather unappealing reality, restaurants frequently advertise the availability of snails with a hand-drawn picture of a smiling snail frolicking among flowers, or just happily surrounded by snail-friends (ooze, translucency, and amorphousness are all down-played).

Though I have remained unpersuaded by the drawings, the enthusiasm of my Spanish friends convinced me I needed to try this seasonal delicacy. When ordered, snails come in little glasses, submerged in a brownish liquid which is to be sipped first before slurping the small bodies out of their shells. I have not yet gained the courage to slurp any bodies (which have been described to me as "gooey" and "fishy," adjectives that fail to entice me) but I agreed to try the liquid. After the briefest of sips, I nodded in approval: it failed to make me nauseous, and that was success enough for me. The Spaniards continued to coax me into trying a snail itself.

"Well, you know, I'm more or less a vegetarian," I told them, desperate for any excuse.

"But you eat plants," one friend argued. "And plants are animals, too!"

I stared in disbelief, and started to say, "But, no, that's the whole point of the distinction, plants AREN'T animals..." Unfortunately, the beauty of specious reasoning is that its ridiculousness often negates the possibility of logical counter-argument. So I shrugged and sipped down another mouthful of herbed snail-brine. Yum.