Transcript
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B (0:24)
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C (0:30)
Now the rest of the story. Mr. Tuckett is a retired insurance agent. Ralph Tuckett, 67, lives in Fresno, California, but he has become the king of the snails. You see, he was vacationing in Hawaii when he saw something on the menu called escargot. Escargot, he was told, is a delicacy. A snail bathed in garlic and butter and roasted a snail, thought Ralph. You eat snails. But the waiter talked him into it, and they were not bad. There were six of them, he remembers, on the plate. A half dozen of those shriveled up little nothings. And then Ralph remembered that back home in Fresno, in his own garden, he had snails. Thousands of them. And not these tiny ones such as these that he was eating, but big fat ones. And that brings us to the rest of the story. Ralph Tucker's Hawaiian vacation was two years ago. Today he is president of the sca, the Snail Club of America, an organization which he founded. There are 800 members, some of whom are now raising backyard herds of 50,000 or more snails. And that means Mr. Tucker, once retired, is back in business as king of the snails. And this new snail enterprise is anything but sluggish. American restaurants, once almost exclusively dependent on the foreign snail market, are gradually counting on Ralph and company. What's it like at a snail roundup? Well, what Ralph does is sprinkle bran flakes at the perimeter of his garden. Snails love bran flakes. Takes most of them about a day to reach their favorite food, at which point Ralph gathers them up. Snails are corralled by a wooden fence which is ringed with a copper band. And when the snail's antenna touches the copper, they receive a slight static electricity shock which turns them back. After the roundup, Ralph puts the herd on a water diet for three days to flush the grit from their systems. And then he shells them and parboils them and packs them in ice and ships them. The herd has no trouble replenishing itself after each harvest, snails are very affectionate. Snails are also escape artists. And for this reason, live shipment is done but no longer preferred. Once, a half ton of them ate through their shipping crates and then started eating the truck that was transporting them. Another time, a live snail got loose in a restaurant kitchen and remained undetected until it was seen riding through the dining room on top of a cheesecake on the dessert cart. So for Ralph Tucker, there is no business like snail business. And it's starting to look like the United States domestic market might someday wipe out the foreign snail trade. The irony being that the snail, which destroys $30 million in California crops per year, is now a full fledged California crop itself. And Mr. Tucker owes his success to a Hawaiian vacation two years ago, during which time he was talked into trying escargot. Was it the way they tasted? No other taste was entirely forgettable. The price on the menu was not right then and there, that restaurant table. As he recalled the multitude of escargot in his own backyard. Mr. Tucker did some calculating, and his calculations have since proved correct. Ralph Tucker could easily afford to wholesale snails for 20 cents each. And yet for those six scrawny ones in that restaurant, he had paid $12 and 50 cents. So he went into the business. Now you know the rest of the story.