September 2023

Limpets and jellyfish, cockles and mussels, oysters and snails… They have gone from being famine food or the food of the poor to expensive delicacies for recherché feasts. They may even become the staple foods of the future.

Before the comparatively recent arrival of modern industrial farming and global transport systems, famine was a constant possibility in Europe, as it still is over much of the world. Only the most privileged did/do not have to worry about starving to death. Farmers watched the sky and their fields and livestock, and prayed to a multitude of gods in an attempt to guard against bad weather and disease wiping out their crops and herds. The brutal demands of unscrupulous landlords for excessive rent and labour often made matters worse. Nowadays , we have the growing realisation that there are too many people for the planet to support in the way we are used to, and food in the future may be very different from today. Invertebrates may be the key to survival, as they have been for millennia in difficult situations. Invertebrates are animals without backbones, about 95% of all animals. This includes cockles and mussels and oysters and limpets.

It is weird to think that many of the foods scavenged in the wild by starving peasants or hunter-gatherers in marginal environments have become much-prized delicacies, or suggested as a possible source of protein for the future. In Orkney, limpets (Patella vulgata) grow on every rock. Limpets were normally used as fish bait but were eaten as ‘famine food’ in bad years. They are considered to be quite nutritious, although rather chewy. Yet in some parts of the world limpets are regarded as a delicacy. On the island of Madeira, they actually have a limpet festival, where the shellfish are served grilled in their shells and flavoured with garlic and lemon.  

I cannot imagine why anybody would want to eat snails (Helix pomatia) if they weren’t starving. I found them just like small pieces of chewing gum in a strong garlic sauce. I wouldn’t serve them at my feast. I would feed them to my pig and roast the pork. Flora Thompson in ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’, Penguin Modern Classics 1973, Chapter I page 24, mentions being sent out to collect snails to fatten the family pig. However, snails have been popular treats for millennia. One of my favourite letters by the Roman writer Pliny the Younger was to his friend Septitius Clarus, who hadn’t turned up to a dinner invitation. It mentions snails as one of the hors d’oevres he had missed. Mind you, the Romans considered sows’ udders and boiled parrot to be delicacies, so one wonders about their tastes.

When Charles Dickens was writing his novels commenting on life in 19^th century London, oysters  (Ostrea edulis) were the food of the poor, in fact, according to his character Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers, eating oysters was a clear sign of poverty. Oysters are now an expensive treat. Wild oyster stocks have been depleted and we have to farm them, as indeed the Romans did. There is also an interesting debate at the moment about whether vegans can eat oysters and mussels because they don’t have a central nervous system, or whether the concentrations of nerve tissue in various parts of their bodies count as a brain. 

And finally (for now), the most obviously invertebrate of all invertebrates is the jellyfish. When I read in a historical novel about people in 16^th century Japan eating jellyfish, I wasn’t sure whether the author was making it up. But my son was offered fried jellyfish as a special treat while on holiday in Malaysia. He said they didn’t taste of much but they looked like scrambled egg, and he clearly enjoyed them. They remind me of the description of human beings by an alien life form in a Star Trek episode: “big ugly bags of mostly water”. Somehow I don’t think that the future of human nutrition lies with jellyfish!

Heroines in Jane Austin novels are always in need of sal volatile. “Young ladies are delicate plants,” as Mr Woodhouse said in “Emma”. They react to any distressing situation with a genteel faint, so they always carry a pretty little bottle of smelling salts. I’m afraid that I am not very genteel. Sal volatile always reminds me of a disastrous experiment I carried out while I was an archaeology student.

I was working on chipped stone tools from the very earliest part of the Stone Age, around 300,000 years ago. For some reason that I can’t remember now, I wanted to take photographs of the details on the surfaces of a lot of these flakes. Flint is very shiny and I couldn’t get good photos because the camera flash reflected so badly off the surface of the flakes. One of my more scientific colleagues suggested coating the flakes with a matt film. He produced a nifty little device which allowed me to heat crystals of ammonium chloride i.e. sal volatile in a glass bulb over a Bunsen burner. This produced curls of grey vapour which could be blown gently over the flints through a rubber tube, coating them with a non-reflective grey film. I felt like a real scientist with my Bunsen and my tubes of chemicals. It’s a pity that the experiment was a complete failure. However, I probably inhaled enough smelling salts to prevent me fainting for the rest of my life.

“Diamonds are forever” goes the song. Not quite true, as I proved during an even more disastrous experiment with flint tools. Another part of the project involved trying to replicate the effect on flint flakes of being tumbled along in a river. Tumbling wears down the edges of the flakes and smooths the surfaces.

I bought a little machine used by gemstone enthusiasts, which had a drum turned by an electric motor.  You put the flint flakes into the drum and tumbled them for different periods of time with different combinations of sand and water and pebbles. However my little tumbler proved inadequate and I somehow got permission to use a bigger one at the Geological Museum in South Kensington. The staff there suggested that I should number the individual flakes and kindly lent me a diamond-tipped drill to do it with. Flint is mostly silica, which is an extremely hard substance, although in theory not as hard as diamond. In theory. I must be the only student ever to have worn all the diamonds off the end of an expensive diamond-tipped drill. I slunk from the laboratory in shame, and my days as that kind of experimental scientist ended there.