A Japanese snail farmer has found a way to breed Burgundian escargots so that they are ready to eat in four months, rather than the four years they take to grow in the wild.
His innovations are so radical and successful that French breeders are beating a path to his door in Matsusaka, west of Tokyo, to learn his secrets.
In truth they aren’t secrets any more, because the Times’ Richard Lloyd Parry has the scoop: Toshihide Takase found by trial and error that he could compensate for Japan’s acidic soils and humid summers by feeding his snails a diet of soybeans and ground-up oyster shells.
He produces 100,000 snails a year and sells them to upmarket restaurants for nearly $100 per batch of 100.
A peculiarity of the French snail business, meanwhile, is that it isn’t French. Escargots ordered in Paris are likely to have been harvested in the wild in Eastern Europe.
