Snails don’t sound like the raciest thing in the world but they are undergoing a kind of renaissance in the UK which has seen them flying off snail farms faster than supply can keep up.
It is
estimated that snail production in the UK has risen from around 30,000 snails per year in 2000 to more than 750,000 this year. The media spotlight is also firmly on the modest molluscs with everyone from The Independent to The Sun and TV's Countryfile and Food Unwrapped programmes featuring snail farms.
Snails are packed full of protein, omega 3s and minerals and don’t store fat.They used to be a staple part of the British diet, especially at this time of year during Lent. They were known as ‘wall fish’ and classified as seafood meaning they could be eaten during times of fasting like Lent and on Fridays. When cooked correctly they are a million miles away from the rubbery chewy things that have the British gagging into their napkins; they have an earthy mushroomy taste that is redolent of woodlands and forest floors.
Given all this it might be better to ask not why snails are suddenly becoming so popular, but why it has taken so long.
Free range snails
H & RH Escargots is a snail farm in Kent which has had everyone from The Independent newspaper to BBC1’s Countryfile paying them a visit. It produces 50,000 snails a year and has recently started its own snail farming course to meet the demand for training in the subject.
Joint owner of of
H & RH Escargots, Helen Howard, thinks it is part of the desire for home-grown, provenance-assured food that is driving demand. She started her snail farm from very modest beginnings seven-and-a-half years ago. Her daughter had just gone to agricultural college so Helen began to look around for agri-activities that were relatively simple and didn’t require a great deal of land. She started breeding snails in her spare room but soon moved to an outdoor free range operation. She now has a quarter of an acre of land including a fruit farm and temperature-controlled Nissen hut.
Helen, along with her daughter and joint-owner, Rachel, grows Helix Aspersa Maxima, the hardier, larger and faster growing farmed version of the common garden snail. Their USP is that they sell their snails live, cooling them down first to put them into hibernation before packing them off in the post, a method that isn’t totally without its challenges.
“Once they warm up, they start wandering about and thinking ‘how do I get out of here?’” says Helen. “When I started out I didn’t take into account that snails like eating cardboard and paper and an early batch arrived at a chef with the invoice and cooking instructions eaten.” Now she uses plastic mesh bags and strawberry punnets and the lady from the post office doesn’t mind as long as she can’t hear them moving.
It was one of Helen’s live snail postal dispatches that started
Aylesbury Escargots out on the long road to snail farming. Sophie Wharton of the fledgling husband-and-wife company had always felt a connection to snails as a child and they had caught her eye again recently when looking at polytunnels to expand into the micro herb market. Instead she had her head turned by the snails in a neighbouring polytunnel and had soon gone to visit Helen’s farm in Kent to find out more about farming them.
“Helen sent us some snails through the post,” says Sophie and when they arrived they were awake and had eaten all these holes in the box. There was all these little heads popping out looking at me; there was no way I could have eaten them.”
Darts and classic FM: getting snails in the mood for love
Instead she kept them in her front room until, without her knowing, they started breeding. Soon snails were filling their conservatory, then their shed, and soon the barn had to be converted. Four years down the line they now have a breeding polytunnel, a purging barn, a commercial kitchen and a 1,000 square metre outdoor enclosure which they recently expanded to triple production to keep up with demand. This includes a whole field of rapeseed that the 400,000 snails munch their way through each year.
Aylesbury
This rigorous approach seems to have paid dividends. Dorset Snails has developed a secret, mechanised labour-saving device which they estimate has cut down 90% of the manual labour involved in farming their snails. They are also one of the only farms to produce Helix Aspersa Muller, the common garden snail, a breed which David insists are the best tasting.
For David, snails are the restaurant food of the future. “We don’t tap into an existing market,” he says. “When we sell snails to chefs, we’re creating new markets and it’s growing all the time. We’ve never had a period of growth like this and I think it’s going to get better next year and the year after.”
