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HELICICULTURE: RAISING SNAILS.

 
  The Heliciculture is the art of farming snails in order to use their high level protein meat, their eggs to make a kind of  white caviar and the slime in cosmetics, although today raising snails can also be seen in a playful aspect, that is as a hobby, something which is increasingly taking more adherents.

The snail farming is very demanding as for the hygiene.

   The use of snail as food  dates from ancient times, since mollusks fossils have been found in prehistoric caves. In Roman times not only were the snails consumed, but they were also grown, as the Romans thought up the first known enclosures to breed snails, about the year 50 B.C. where they fattened the snails with wine and bran. We must comment that the word heliciculture is formed by "helici" which derives from the Latin Helix,-icis, "spiral" and cultura "culture".

   At Middle Ages time the snails were very much consumed especially during Lent time as the snails meat was considered suitable meat when abstinence. They prepared the snails with fried onions, boiled or in kebabs, being a common dish in many monasteries throughout Europe. At the beginning of the 18th century the snail disappeared from the tables of the noble, as the snail was considered as a dish for the poor; but during a reception for the Czar of Russia, Talleyrand, a French politician and gourmet, recovered this dish, becoming a delicacy for the cookery of the European nobility. In Spain the use of snails in cooking is part of our culture, used in times of famine, a typical dish during certain holidays and considered a luxury in many restaurants.

The snails are a source of no fat animal protein 

Until the mid-twentieth century the heliciculture was limited to searching snails for their own consumption or for saling in markets, but at the end of the seventies France and Italy began farming snails as an alternative source of livelihood for many families. In Spain this is something unknown for most people, but it is bursting into the Spanish way of living, due to the search for greener food products and the reduction of snails as natural resource; thus from the point of view of the snails marketing, these farms are a form of sustainable development of the species.
 

If you want to read our other articles about the cockroaches, moths, slug and snails traps as well as some curiosities on these insects,

click below.