Oh, the SHAME!

My father died in 2024. Right before that, I was laid off from my role as a User Experience Designer at Fidelity Investments. After that, I found myself physically and cognitively constricted by grief and unaddressed trauma. Relief came through yoga, and unexpectedly, through animal-assisted therapy. The snails I had been nonchalantly studying and breeding presented a pattern for reexamining my life choices. You may consider me an artist-turned-citizen-scientist.

The raising of Giant African Land Snails (GALs) is common across Nigeria. We eat them both unceremoniously and with great enthusiasm. They are a clean protein, take on the simplest and most complex flavors with ease, and cost almost nothing.

When we travel back to Nigeria, we always come home with food. Uziza leaves, harvested, dried and folded into bags. And snails, chosen carefully, stone-like shells cracked open with a hammer, the meat washed, dried, and packaged with care.

Then, we arrive at customs.

The leaves: scrutinized. The officers, always suspicious, frowning, poking, prodding, provoking. We learned to stand very still and say very little. The snails, through no fault of their own, resemble female genitalia of all shades. They are gawked at, manhandled, sometimes outright snatched. We learned to absorb the message: it feeds you at home, but has no place here. The shame of it — palpitating hearts, sweaty palms, the discomfort on the journey lingers, unaddressed.

So when tariffs tightened in 2024 and importing processed snails became even more difficult, the question at the back of my mind finally surfaced:

Why aren’t Americans farming snails instead of importing them?

On interviewing snail enthusiasts from all walks of life, that familiar emotion resurfaced: shame. The instinct to make yourself smaller; hide what feeds you. In my family’s case, let’s not be the weirdo trembling in a government building, holding a bag of dried, giant, African, snails. I’m a digger so let’s follow the thread to its origin, shall we?

America’s revulsion toward the snail is inherited. Once upon a time Puritan moral framework treated the body as suspect, pleasure as dangerous, and foreign food traditions as primitive. Puritan forebearers migrated to New England with strict notions about food production and preparation, a colonial minister, Charles Woodmason, called Native American food “exceedingly filthy and most execrable”. This demeaning thread produced a culture uniquely hostile to an animal that is slow, soft, slick, and unapologetically sensual.

That same framework, as Frederick Kaufman documents in A Short History of the American Stomach, gave us a food culture in which the stomach’s equilibrium was a moral indicator — and what you ate was a measure of your virtue. Escargot survived in American fine dining only because it arrived laundered through French prestige — rich butter and cream, garlic, a delicate fork, a price point that signals sophistication. As one food historian put it plainly: “the honor of being a ‘delicacy’ is not rooted in any concrete, objective criteria. Food gains and loses prestige depending on who prepares it and who eats it.” Strip away the French and you have what Mama Ke’ukwu made with her hands: the same animal, the same protein, the same nourishment. But one version belongs on a white tablecloth. The other gets confiscated at the border.

That distinction is about which bodies, traditions, and hungers are permitted to exist in the U.S. public. The negative impacts are tangible and widespread.

The U.S. government has spent over $24 million across three separate campaigns eradicating GALs (brought in through the illegal exotic pet market) in Florida alone — not farming it, nor studying it as a resource, but destroying it. Every dollar spent on eradication erodes the multibillion dollar, domestic, protein infrastructure this country desperately needs. Every snail killed is soil amendment that never reached depleted fields, a meal that never fed food-insecure families, and mucin compounds that never entered wound-healing formulations. Here we are, actively dismantling a food system while calling it pest management. Oops!

The label matters because once something is classified as a pest, it loses its entire lineage. The snail that fed West African communities for centuries, which appears in Roman culinary records, is currently generating billions across global food, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, and biofertilizer markets. Hello! That snail, when it crosses an invisible line into American soil without documentation, becomes, singularly, a threat. Its reproductive potential makes it an extraordinary livestock animal: hermaphroditic, exponential, requiring no refrigeration, survives weeks to months without food; sealing itself inside its shell until conditions improve, emerging intact. Unfortunately, those are also the very arguments for its destruction.

In a world facing simultaneous food, fuel, and fertilizer shortages, with famine spreading across Africa and soil depletion accelerating globally, the snail may be the most important livestock of the century. 

Mind at relative ease, I've pivoted to developing EscarGrow — a sealed, APHIS-compliant farming system designed to make heliciculture (snail farming) legal and teachable in the United States.

I believe the snail is a mirror of what we discard, who we exclude, and the bridge between what sustains people and what a society decides is acceptable. It is costing us a brilliant future, so we have to reckon with the shame.