{"id":111,"date":"2010-02-24T19:45:32","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T19:45:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/?p=111"},"modified":"2016-03-04T01:33:58","modified_gmt":"2016-03-04T01:33:58","slug":"hunting-wild-mission-snails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/?p=111","title":{"rendered":"Hunting Wild, Mission Snails"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally published in Mission Loc@l<\/a>, February 2010<\/em><\/p>\n

In the same way that you can find the party by heading for the kitchen, the best way to find snails is to look for what they like to eat. Iso Rabins has only just caught sight of the field of wild mallow greens, and he\u2019s already whipped a plastic to-go container out of his messenger bag and is stabbing air holes in the top with his pocketknife.<\/p>\n

By the time I catch up to him, he is addressing the underside of a tangle of leaves. \u201cHey buddy,\u201d he says\u00a0 to the gumball-sized snail clinging the bottom.<\/p>\n

The snail is silent. It looks like it doesn\u2019t even suspect that its destiny is now to be the amuse-bouche<\/em> at the $100 a plate wild-foraged Valentine\u2019s Day dinner that Rabins is cooking. In fact, it appears completely oblivious to the fact that it is being addressed at all.<\/p>\n

Rabins takes the snail between thumb and forefinger, plucks it off the leaf, drops it into the to-go container, and closes the lid. \u201cYou have to make sure you put the lid on tight,\u201d he says, \u201cor they\u2019ll pop it off and escape. They\u2019re surprisingly strong\u2026\u201d He moves on another leaf, \u201cHey buddy\u2026\u201d I hear him say, faintly.<\/p>\n

In the Pleistocene era, if you were a resident of the Mission you would hunt sabercats, dire wolves, sloths, mastodons, bears, mammoths, and prehistoric camels. If you were a resident of the Mission before the Spanish showed up, in the mid- 1700s, you would have fished, or hunted deer. After that, options narrow. You would still have fished, maybe rustled someone\u2019s cattle. Today, if you are looking to catch a wild animal in the Mission and eat it, you\u2019re down to squirrel, pigeon, raccoon, possum, and snail. It might be theoretically possible to catch a fish in Mission Creek, but you wouldn\u2019t want to eat it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And so it is snail \u2013 the slowest, and most readily huntable of the bunch. It\u2019s not even native snail. California has more than 200 native snail species, but the vast majority of the Mission District snails are the invasive species Helix aspersa<\/a>, closely related to the escargot. It was imported as food during the Gold Rush era<\/a> and dumped after it failed to sell. Helix aspersa<\/em> thrived, possibly for the same reason that it was thrown out in the first place: not many people in the Mission are especially excited about eating it.<\/p>\n

Except for Rabins. The Mission District resident and ex-film student has built a business <\/a> out of figuring out what in the neighborhood is consumable, and then using that information in different ways. He leads foraging tours. He has a list of subscribers that he delivers a box of wild food to. He throws underground dinner parties where the food is made from foraged ingredients. And so, eating the snail is more than just eating a snail \u2013 it\u2019s linking people to the neighborhood in a new way. \u201cYou think about them as a pest, but then you find out that you can eat them,\u201d says Rabins. \u201cIt\u2019s just really exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Rabins started eating nature, he didn\u2019t spend much time with it. In Vermont, where he grew up, wilderness was as he puts it \u201ca place to get drunk with friends.\u201d But when he moved to Eureka, he fell in with a group of professional mushroom foragers, and found a vocation. \u201cI learned a little through books,\u201d he says, \u201cI read my Euell Gibbons \u2013 he\u2019s pretty much the grandfather of modern foraging. But it never looks quite the same in a book as it does out in the real world. And so I mostly learned from other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the things learned outside of the world of books was how little the foragers were being paid compared to the price the mushrooms they gathered ultimately sold for.\u00a0 Rabins began to work as a middleman \u2013 cold-calling chefs, knocking on the back doors of restaurants, brokering deals.<\/p>\n

There was a learning curve involved. \u201cMy original plan was to organize the foragers,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it doesn\u2019t really work that way. A forager doesn\u2019t work the same way that a restaurant does.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, a forager might break an appointment one week, then call unexpectedly with a huge haul because they\u2019d been up in the woods for two days on methamphetamine, a drug that, for all its faults, enables incredible bursts of compulsive searching behavior. \u00a0 \u201cIt does makes them amazing foragers. They\u2019ll be out looking for black trumpet mushrooms at night \u2013 you can hardly even see those during the day<\/em> \u2013 and then come back with this huge bag of them,\u201d says Rabins.\u00a0 This cycle failed, however, to enable reliable business or social relationships.<\/p>\n

So that was the first hitch. The second was when Rabins lost almost $2000 shipping a load of mushrooms cross-country. The mushrooms got stuck in transit in a hot warehouse on a hot weekend and essentially cooked from the inside. That was around the same time\u00a0 he decided it was time to branch out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t believe<\/em> how many snails are out right now,\u201d Rabins says happily. \u201cI feel bad taking all these little ones\u201d he continues. \u201cI guess it\u2019s just like \u201cthe fire that burns twice as bright for half as long.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rabins cuts off a tangle of radish greens and stuffs them into his bag. He\u2019ll feed them to the snails later. Dusk is falling, and the snails are indeed suddenly abundant \u2013 oozing and munching their way across the greenery of the park. During the day, they\u2019re hard to find \u2013 the sun dries them out, and so snails\u00a0 hide in shady areas, pull back into their shells and secrete a membrane doorway that keeps them moist and away from the elements. \u201cWe would probably find as many if we went out at dawn,\u201d adds Rabins. \u201cBut I don\u2019t roll like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year the SF Weekly ran a story<\/a> about Rabins that got him banned from the Presidio. Since then, he\u2019s asked reporters not to say where he forages. I will say this. We are in a park. In the Mission. Among the other things you can find in the Mission and eat: miner\u2019s lettuce<\/a>, chickweed<\/a>, wild fennel<\/a>, yerba buena<\/a>, mushrooms (especially shaggy mane<\/a>), oxalis<\/a>, blood orange and meyer lemon trees, figs. Among the things that you might get from eating such things: leptospiriosis<\/a> and\/or that creepy feeling that you get when eating something that a dog might have peed on.<\/p>\n

The first time I ever knowingly ate Mission-foraged food was years ago, when a video game programmer served a huge bowl of salad at a dinner party that she later revealed was full of miner\u2019s lettuce gathered from the tiny wedge of park at Coso and Precita. As I set down my fork into my empty salad bowl, my mind drifted to my only memory of that park: escorting my roommate\u2019s dog there so that said dog could do its business all over the foliage.<\/p>\n

But I had already eaten the salad. It was delicious. I didn\u2019t die. Leptospiriosis is rare \u2013 between 100-200 cases a year, according to the Center for Disease Control. And buying greens at the supermarket carries its risks too<\/a>. I am still relieved to note that we forage in areas of the Mission that are off the well-trodden dog walking circuit, and far from industrial areas that may have heavy metals lingering in the soil.<\/p>\n

Now that it\u2019s almost pitch black, there\u2019s a snail under nearly every leaf. In the indigo of nightfall, all that is visible is the beam of Rabins\u2019 flashlight skittering along the undersides of the greenery. The only sound is that of the plastic container being peeled open, and snapped shut, the light briefly flashing through the shimmering web of snail mucus streaking the sides.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The quarry…<\/em><\/p>\n

The darkness, plus the flashlight, is making us conspicuous. Time to go. \u201cHeh,\u201d says Rabins, as we walk past a stern-looking parks worker. \u201cWe\u2019re leaving with a bag full of snails. And no one is the wiser.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next time I catch up with the snails, they\u2019re diced and stuffed into mushroom caps. They taste like butter and garlic and something chewy \u2013 you\u2019d never know that they were caught just a few minutes from here, or even that they\u2019re snails. A crew of volunteers plates them up and carries them out to the center of a Mission District warehouse, where couples clasp hands across candlelit tablecloths.<\/p>\n

The mood in the dining room is boozy, convivial, intermittently mutinous. The necessity of washing dishes in between most courses creates lag in the 10-course menu. At one point supplies run low. Panicked on-site foraging reveals leftovers from a dinner party hosted the prior evening by a different chef. Problem solved.<\/p>\n

A tipsy group gathers at the front of the building, where the owner of the building is explaining how when the warehouse was first built over a hundred years ago, boats would float past what is now the front door, and tie up at a dock outside. The creek, buried under Caesar Chavez street for decades now, is still running underneath us. Another fragment of the natural world folded into the city \u2013 running parallel to our own lives, largely unnoticed. A moment of quiet falls, then passes. The group returns to its wine and romancing, and in the kitchen one of the volunteers downs the last snail-stuffed mushroom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Pleistocene era, if you were a resident of the Mission you would hunt sabercats, dire wolves, sloths, mastodons, bears, mammoths, and prehistoric camels<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":309,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":420,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions\/420"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}