Snail farmers in France cling on to a centuries-old delicacy | Canada Voices

A month before Christmas last year, a farmer in northeastern France awoke to an unusual kind of heist. Overnight, robbers had broken in and stolen the farm’s most valuable assets. Not money or equipment, but snails worth more than $145,000, roughly a year’s production.

The unlucky farmer, Jean-Mathieu Dauvergne, couldn’t believe it. “When he first saw that the farm’s doors were wide open, he didn’t even panic,” said his daughter, Inès Dauvergne. “He thought someone had stolen money from the store’s cash register, but not his entire stock of snails.”

The robbers struck before the holidays, when the dish is a festive staple. For L’Escargot des Grands Crus, the Dauvergnes’ small family-run farm in Marne, that season accounts for 60 per cent of annual revenue, Ms. Dauvergne said.

Despite strong and steady demand, snails are difficult to farm. The hard part isn’t selling out – it’s producing enough to cover costs. With unpredictable losses, heliciculture is a risky business that few farmers manage to sustain year over year.

There are fewer than 300 remaining snail farms in France. They work year-round to supply restaurants and families with the prized delicacy of escargot. Yet, their efforts aren’t enough to meet the country’s demand, and over 90 per cent of the 17,000 tonnes of snails eaten in France every year are now imported from countries such as Romania or Turkey.

Often prepared in the “Burgundy-style,” the dish seems deceptively simple: a snail served in its shell, slathered with parsley and garlic butter. Families often buy it frozen, pop it in the oven until the butter foams and serve it hot. But the small mollusc’s journey from grass to plate is anything but straightforward.

Young snails, no bigger than lentils, grow up in open-air enclosures designed just for them: grassy fields with wooden planks to crawl on, barriers to prevent their escape and water sprinklers to maintain humidity. Over several months, they eat, crawl and gradually reach their adult size. When the time comes, snails are harvested and moved into a temperature-controlled room to enter dormancy.

Once dormant, the snails are washed, blanched and removed from their shells. Unpalatable parts must be trimmed by hand, one by one. That’s when farmers cook them, typically in a flavourful broth. This hands-on production process costs close to $26 per kilogram. For comparison, a kilogram of French oysters costs less than $11 to produce.

Even after all these steps, the snails are still not ready to eat. They are sold to chefs for use in recipes or returned to their shells, slathered in herb butter and packaged for families to enjoy at home.

This lengthy and labour-intensive preparation, combined with historical roots in religious and aristocratic traditions, helps explain how a creature so common in the wild became such a highly prized delicacy, said Patrick Rambourg, a French historian of culinary and food practices.

Because of their unique status between land and water, snails could be eaten during fasting periods on Fridays and during Lent, when Catholics were required to abstain from meat. An early recipe book from the 14th century, Le Ménagier de Paris, describes the dish as a luxury eaten by the bourgeoisie.

Over time, escargot became widely associated with French cuisine in the global imagination, and it’s common to see tourists lining up outside Parisian bistros to try this curious appetizer.

The species that French people are crazy about – Burgundy snails and brown garden snails – are considered invasive in Canada. So, instead of relying on domestic farming, Canada has imported over $4-million worth of prepared snails from France since 2020, according to Statistics Canada.

“We’re not the only ones who eat them, but at a certain point, the snail became representative of French culinary identity,” he said. “The external perception from foreigners played a role in that and it became a cultural marker, just like frog legs.”

When trying a snail, don’t picture the sluggish creature that you see crawling around the garden, said Mr. Rambourg. “When the snail is prepared and put back into the shell with parsley butter, there’s nothing slimy about it. When you eat snails, you have to forget the living animal as it was before.” At first bite, the texture is halfway between a mushroom and meat, and tastes earthy and buttery.

The global appetite for French snails reaches even the smallest producers. L’escargot des Valanques, a small one-man farm in Provence, was once approached by an importer from Singapore, who offered to buy the farm’s entire stock for restaurant kitchens on the other side of the world.

Stéphane Despax, who runs the farm in La Motte-d’Aigues, turned down the offer. He is a newcomer in this niche trade, with only eight seasons under his belt, but is already busy supplying renowned chefs and Michelin-starred restaurants in the south of France.

Despite the success, his profit margins remain thin and production is unpredictable. “I never know exactly how many we’ll get, I just know how many I start with,” he said. “From one year to the next, farmers can easily lose all of their snails to diseases and inclement weather.”

In 2022, a heat wave hit before the harvest and killed about 70 per cent of Mr. Despax’s snails. To keep the business afloat, he barely paid himself a salary that year. An obstacle like that can drive farmers out of business, he said, but he managed to resume production the year after.

He begins each season in March, by releasing 400,000 baby snails into a 13,000-square-foot section of his land, already thick with plants he grew for them to eat. In a good year, around 50 per cent of these snails make it to the harvest.

Mr. Despax learned his trade at school, in a six-month program that brought together 15 aspiring snail farmers from across France. Of his cohort, he’s only aware of three who are still in business today.

Despite last year’s tremendous loss at the hands of the snail thieves, the Dauvergnes aren’t discouraged. Fortunately, the live snails set aside to reproduce in the following season were untouched. After the holidays, they closed up shop for a bit to catch their breath and begin preparing for 2026, when they’ll start fresh with new eggs.