It May Be A Slimy Affair, But Snails Pick Up The Pace

The best thing about being a snail wrangler is that in the event of a stampede you’ve got lots and lots of time to jump out of the way.

The worst thing, it seems to me, would be actually having to pop one of the ugly little suckers into your mouth and feel it slide the range past your tonsils.

“Not me,” says Jackie Owens with a shudder and a laugh. “I don’t like ‘em.”

Owens, however, is an expert on slippery, spineless critters. She spent eight years cooking and managing the Senate Dining Room at the statehouse in Olympia.

“Some of them were real slobs,” she adds of her former customers.

Fortunately for squeamish me, none of Owens’ shelled herd were ready to eat when I dropped in on her South Hill snail ranch Monday morning.

But for many, many dining daredevils - and not all of them merely insane French people - properly prepared snails are an extraordinary, lip-smacking delight.

Owens and her pals who run Escargot Edibles (dial 536-0844 for information) want to cater to these culinary thrill-seekers.

Their new business consists of seven Spokane-area women on a mission to raise 30,000 head of snails and drive them right down the gullet of the Inland Empire.

They have about half that many now and such snail rearing is rare. In the entire nation there probably are no more than 20-25 such ventures.

Isn’t it wonderful how times change?

It wasn’t all that long ago that the only way a woman could follow a slime trail to the top was to marry a politician.

But Hillary Clinton notwithstanding, snail breeding offers an alternative slippery road to riches for the modern woman.

Well, maybe.

“Now that we’ve figured it out, we have the means to create hundreds of thousands of these little hummers,” says Loretta Wilson, Owens’ friend and snail buddy. “Now I need to know if there’s a market.”

Statistically speaking, there is. The snail barons of Europe - which would make a terrific name for a garage rock band - export 500 tons of canned snailstock to the United States each year.

These sell for about a buck a snail in gourmet restaurants as hors d’oeuvres, which is French for: “overpriced things you’d never eat at home.”

Since a snail only chomps about a nickel’s worth of food a year, you can see there is a Cleveland-sized profit margin here.

The question is whether our demand to eat the cousins of the very pests we try to poison out of our backyards is enough to support a business.

“Spokane has never been considered a sophisticated city like Seattle or San Francisco,” Owens adds, “but we’re getting more of it.”

Indeed we are. Owens and Wilson recently took fresh samples to the chefs at some of our better local restaurants and received rave reviews.

In fact, one Frenchman began waving his arms in excitement as if he’d had a religious experience or just seen a Jerry Lewis movie.

“I ‘av not ‘ad theez zince lee-ving Fraah-nce,” he declared through his nose.

These are amazingly odd creatures. Um, snails, not Frenchmen.

Like some elderly members of Congress, they can go for weeks in states of semi-hibernation.

It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes about eight months to get a snail ready for a little garlic and butter.

Snail sex is downright daffy. They make whoopie by - get this - wrapping their necks (which contain both male and female organs) around each other.

The entire mating process takes about four or five days to consummate and, when finished, both consenting mollusks smoke a cigarette and slide away to lay eggs.

Although snails are related to clams, all this weird androgynous behavior seems more like Madonna.

To their credit, however, not one snail has ever starred in a bad musical.

, DataTimes