more popular/widespread domestication of snails

You need an isolated society with no access to better alternatives.

Over exploitation, sacralisation, limited husbandry, elite religious practice?

Why not a sacral tradition that survives until 500BCE? Sacred traditions can excuse stuff that wouldn't publicly be accepted, and tend to have a slower cycle of replacement than secular actions.

If we can get it to 500BCE then the Romans* are going to want to duplicate it just to show off that they can eat everything.

yours,
Sam R.
 
Over exploitation, sacralisation, limited husbandry, elite religious practice?

Why not a sacral tradition that survives until 500BCE? Sacred traditions can excuse stuff that wouldn't publicly be accepted, and tend to have a slower cycle of replacement than secular actions.

If we can get it to 500BCE then the Romans* are going to want to duplicate it just to show off that they can eat everything.

yours,
Sam R.


I'm not aware of any sacral tradition that ever lead to domestication, or even a hypothesis for a sacral tradition being the inspiration for domestication. My understanding is that generally, sacral traditions are quite volatile and erratic, the transmission of knowledge is highly restricted. I don't think it's a good candidate for this sort of thing.

But if you'd like to make the case, go for it.
 
Over exploitation, sacralisation, limited husbandry, elite religious practice?

Why not a sacral tradition that survives until 500BCE? Sacred traditions can excuse stuff that wouldn't publicly be accepted, and tend to have a slower cycle of replacement than secular actions.

If we can get it to 500BCE then the Romans* are going to want to duplicate it just to show off that they can eat everything.

yours,
Sam R.

Might work, but it has to be not obviously anti-economic. Sacred traditions made Egyptians keep crocodiles in captivity for centuries, but did not produce domesticated crocodiles.
Two problems I see are:
1) that snails are relatively finicky; they don't do very well with drought or cold, and investing in them a significant food item requires quite an effort. Probably they are going to be tricky to stockpile and preserve; not impossible, but necessitates specialised techniques that will work for them only. And stockpiling and preservation are pretty important for the significance of central food items.
2) Specialised techniques for snail husbandry will work, as said above, for them only. Most human domesticates fit a specialised niche into a relatively homogenous array of broad techniques that apply to more than one species. You can preserve and prepare meat and leather more or less the same way, regardless it is from ox, sheep, horse or pig. You feed horses or oxen with more or less the same kind of stuff. You treat camel or sheep wool in a broadly similar way.
There are specific techniques that are developed, for example for bees and silkworms. Both are managed with methods that would not work at all for any other domesticate, methods that were developed and refined because both provided something with very high return on investment that could not be obtained otherwise. Wax, honey and silk (let alone other bee byproducts) are high value stuff. Remarkably, bees are not eaten ever and I think neither are silkworms.
Domesticating snail will require developing a lot of specialised snail-related expertise about feeding, breeding, preserving, protecting, cooking etc. them, and none of this is likely to apply to any other domesticate in any straightforward way.
 
Would we even want snails? Perhaps shell-less mollusks, slugs would be a better choice. The biological productivity that goes into the shells might be diverted elsewhere.

Or perhaps the point of it is some utility in the shells themselves?
 
I'm not aware of any sacral tradition that ever lead to domestication, or even a hypothesis for a sacral tradition being the inspiration for domestication. My understanding is that generally, sacral traditions are quite volatile and erratic, the transmission of knowledge is highly restricted. I don't think it's a good candidate for this sort of thing.

But if you'd like to make the case, go for it.

Not my field of expertise in the least. I'm happy to get an expert "no," rather than speculate in a way so removed from reality.

Regarding sacred traditions I was thinking on Engel's "long run" history of the family, and of the continuation of past material structures as current cultural structures. Obviously any sacred snail thing can't be as transient as "Snailgod is awesome!" You'd need something like a snail-skin group, and even then, it'd be representative (We're so posh that nails are obligatory for us and us alone), and I am _completely_ at sea with skin culture structures.

Give me advanced modernity and industrial class and I can make sense of it.

Appropos: how are snails industrially produced for human consumption?

yours,
Sam R.
 
Would we even want snails? Perhaps shell-less mollusks, slugs would be a better choice. The biological productivity that goes into the shells might be diverted elsewhere.

Or perhaps the point of it is some utility in the shells themselves?

The ones that are usually eaten in Italy and France at least are snails. I never heard that slugs are ever eaten actually, though I guess they probably might be. I think that many slug species are somewhat toxic and I am not sure if the edible ones can be easily told apart.

I can't see many uses for terrestrial slug shells except decoration (and once you start selective breeding, you can have some pretty weird stuff in that department, but probably economically marginal overall). I kind of recall that ground shells can provide a good fertilizer, but it looks like an incredibly roundabout way to get one.

However, breeding snails might be a productive way to use fallow fields in culture that uses biannual rotation. I think that they are pretty good for the soil in general. I don't see this a motivation for domestication, only a possible use after they are domesticated.
 
Not my field of expertise in the least. I'm happy to get an expert "no," rather than speculate in a way so removed from reality.

Regarding sacred traditions I was thinking on Engel's "long run" history of the family, and of the continuation of past material structures as current cultural structures. Obviously any sacred snail thing can't be as transient as "Snailgod is awesome!" You'd need something like a snail-skin group, and even then, it'd be representative (We're so posh that nails are obligatory for us and us alone), and I am _completely_ at sea with skin culture structures.

Give me advanced modernity and industrial class and I can make sense of it.

Appropos: how are snails industrially produced for human consumption?

yours,
Sam R.

I am not sure that "industrially" is the word. You just fence them and make sure moisture, light, temperature and food are adequate.
This wikipedia article is not the best source ever but looks like a start.

Edit: AFAIK, most snails that are eaten are harvested in the wild where I live.
 
Perhaps some sort of slug/snail that produces pearl instead of shell?
Then they'd be prized like oysters and also good for food
 
I don't think a bigger snail would necessarily be the best for human consumption. I've never had snails before but it seems like the larger snails would be less flavorful and worse textured.
 
From what I can tell, most snail cultivation efforts are hampered by relatively low animal density.

A domesticated variety would probably be able to suffer higher densities.
However, we are again at step one: what could make a domestication effort viable to begin with? It looks like it could become self-sustainable and useful after a domestic variety is there, but what factors could create one?
A good plus is that snails would actually turn inedible vegetal waste into edible biomass, but I doubt they're incredibly efficient at that (I think that pigs were the default way to dispose of organic waste in most cases).
Are there edible snails in the South Pacific? In some places there options were quite limited for protein intake in New Guinea and New Zealand for example. Snails could be a partial way out, altough maybe not an easy (were it easy, it would have been done IOTL).
 
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