The slow food movement has really gone too far.
Snail caviar is the flavor du jour taking the culinary world by storm. The tiny, pearled delicacies are selling like hotcakes in Italy, where a kilogram can cost more than $3,000, according to Modern Farmer.
“It’s a flavor that’s incomparable with any other kind of food,” Davide Merlino, the owner of Italy’s largest snail farm, tells Modern Farmer.
Merlino charges $1,900 per kilogram vat of the stuff.
Snail farmers like him are incorporating their slow-moving produce into everything from spa treatments to high-end dishes. As a result, Italy’s snail consumption is up by more than 325 percent in the past two decades, according to the country’s leading agricultural association.
The hefty price tag for the caviar is due to how much work goes into producing the delicacy, which is best enjoyed on “tartares of fish, prawn or beef,” Modern Farmer reports.
The process is a 150-day endeavor, in which snail breeders put sterilized glasses on the ground for snails to lay their eggs in, then sort through the precious deposits and remove non-perfect specimens. Each snail only lays roughly 50 to 100 eggs a year, Modern Farmer reports.
“We have to harvest the little pearls one-by-one using tweezers,” Merlino says.
The French and Italians are the biggest market for the caviale di lumaca, but Merlino has also had orders from Russia, Switzerland and Dubai.
Merlino has some competition, too. Long Island’s Peconic Escargot is supplying a local snail variety to Manhattan’s award-winning Frenchette and Eleven Madison Park.
Apparently delightful snail byproducts don’t stop at the eggs: Their slime is used to prevent wrinkles and boost collagen as part of facial treatments. One Italian luxury spa even offers a treatment involving the mollusks crawling over one’s face.
Simone Sampò, the director of an Italian institute dedicated to the study of snails, has even invented a cruelty-free snail slime harvesting device called the MullerOne or the “snail spa.”
“More and more people are discovering this product for the incredible benefits it has for the skin, the respiratory system and the stomach,” Sampo says in an interview with dw.com.