As ecological collapse forces New England’s fishers to diversify their catch, a sea snail once considered a nuisance might be able to stack up.
“You’ll know you’ve found them when you feel the crunching under your feet,” Jason Jarvis said over his shoulder. I wasn’t sure I would feel anything through my thick-soled platform Crocs, but I played along. The salty water in southern Rhode Island wasn’t warm, but not as cold as I had braced for. By now it was up to our waists, mucky as we shuffled in the direction of the receding tide. A claustrophobic layer of fog made it impossible to know how far the pond actually stretched, but I could see a line of oyster cages bobbing gently, maybe a quarter-mile out, faintly distinguishable from the cloak of gray.
Several paces ahead, Jarvis stopped and angled the cage end of his long, steel clamming rake into the sand. I waded closer, anticipating a crunch. Nothing. But a couple more clumsy steps and suddenly the cushy sand gave way to something gravelly, coarse enough to feel through my bulky, rubbery soles. We’d found them.
The sand here was paved with slipper limpets, a variety of sea snail that grows so quickly and in such dense numbers that it earned the Latin name crepidula fornicata, or “the fornicators.” I had driven two hours from Boston early that morning to meet Jarvis — one of just a handful of fishers even bothering to harvest slipper snails — at the saltwater pond where he’s been gathering the overlooked creatures for the last two years. As climate change, warming seas, and habitat loss have made staple species more elusive — like wild clams, cod, seabass, and oysters — the snail population has stayed strong.
In parts of Europe, where invasive slippers have devastated local ecology, these snails are considered a delicacy. But in North America, where they’re native, the snails have a very different reputation. With the exception of some Indigenous communities, Americans have largely been untempted by sea snail snacks, and instead view them as undesirables and pests — especially professional clammers who have to fight with them to make their living.
While clams burrow deep in the sand, slippers grow on top of it in large stacks of up to a dozen. In places like Rhode Island, where slipper limpets remain an unregulated species with a very limited niche market, clammers are forced to dig through layers of lower-value snails to reach those commercial-friendly clams, typically throwing back the crepidula they dig up. They make the back-breaking work of clamming even more gruelling, whereas the snails themselves are easy pickings. Jarvis uses a small clamming rake because of the scale he’s harvesting, but for most people, no specialized equipment is needed; a garden rake would work, he said, or they’re easy enough to scoop up by hand. Yet somehow, this abundant protein source still feels like a well-kept secret.
That may soon change, thanks to a small but influential segment of the New England seafood strata. Jarvis has been pioneering their harvest and sale, supplying one of the region’s top restaurants — The Shipwright’s Daughter in Mystic, Connecticut — with a steady flow of sea snails. Owner and head chef David Standridge, 2024 recipient of the Best Chef: Northeast James Beard award, eagerly incorporated them into his menu, knowing they would “draw in the weirdos.” “People don’t post the lobster roll [online], they post the weird stuff,” he said, sitting across from me at an empty table in the downtime before the evening rush.
“There was a time when everything looked unimaginably abundant, so one must have a certain feeling that maybe anything could be exploited.”
Limpet dishes like “sea-scargot” (a take on the classic French dish) quickly caught on with his fanbase, and his offerings have since expanded. While they have a distinctly saltier flavor than the average garden snail, these sea snails are comparable to other mollusks, Standridge said, good for pastas and fritters. Last year he experimented with preserving the snails in vinegar, and someday raw limpets might secure a spot on his raw bar. They can replace other shellfish like conch or cherrystone clams, the latter of which have become so expensive that he doesn’t even bother buying them anymore. He can get 100 pounds of limpets from Jarvis for $2.50 per pound, less than half of what he might pay for the same amount of clams.
A few years ago, slipper snails reportedly made waves in a handful of other fine dining rooms, including Dan Barber’s Blue Hill and Thomas Keller’s Per Se. And though limited, Jarvis occasionally has a few competitors on the sea snail market, including seafood retailers like Dune Brothers and American Mussel Harvesters, Inc.
At least in seafood restaurants, Standridge believes the only truly sustainable practice is to let fishermen dictate what’s on the menu — whether that’s sea snails, dogfish, mackerel, or any other locally abundant, attainable species. It’s up to the chef to translate that into something delicious. “It’s my job to make the unusual seem accessible. People come to a place like this where they can try something new,” he said. “If it’s good, they’ll eat it.”
But not everyone is so convinced. Jeffrey Levinton, professor of marine biology at SUNY Stony Brook, told Offrange that he has a hard time understanding the culinary appeal. “There’s so little meat relative to the shell,” he balked. “They’re not going to ever be a serious item in anybody’s cuisine. That’s the bottom line.”
Still, he acknowledged that these snails have remained radically abundant, while other — perhaps more appetizing — species have disappeared.
“In the 1970s, if you were in Shelter Island on the beaches, there would be three feet deep of scallop shells,” Levinton said. But today, because of habitat loss, climate change, and other factors, the bay scallop has practically disappeared from its native Long Island and Cape Cod. “Now it’s three feet deep of crepidula shells. We’ve got reefs of dead crepidula shells.”
“Once the state of Rhode Island figures out somebody can make money from them they’re gonna regulate them and you’d have to have a shellfish license.”
Those shells are particularly recognizable because of the way they’re stacked on top of each other, which Levinton explained is always in the same pattern: an older female on the bottom and younger males on top. (Crepidula, he said, are hermaphroditic, meaning the oldest male will change its sex from male to female when the bottom female dies.) In general, these stacking snails are hardy creatures, with larvae that are “very resilient to all sorts of pollution” and ocean acidification, he explained. So it’s not like their population has suddenly exploded. It’s just that “everything else has declined in abundance.”
“We know they’ve always been abundant. But now wild oysters are gone, scallops are gone,” Levinton said. “As time goes by, other organisms disappear and crepidula survives.”
I asked Levinton what kind of an impact a hypothetical slipper limpet industry might have on the environment. Could we theoretically drive them to the brink of extinction, too? He laughed in my face — not only because he can’t imagine there being that kind of demand for the snails, but because they’re currently “so abundant, I find it hard to speculate without laughing.” But then again, he said, stone-faced, early European settlers used to write home about how the cod in Massachusetts was so prolific it was like you could “walk” on them. A few hundred years later and those cod are no longer here.
“There was a time when everything looked unimaginably abundant,” Levinton said, “so one must have a certain feeling that maybe anything could be exploited.”
We’re a long way off from disrupting the slipper snail population. And regardless, without a reliable way to process and package them, it’s hard to imagine sea snails in American fish markets and grocery stores, where they could be sold in mass quantities. One company in France developed its own proprietary processing method over a decade ago, but nothing similar has made its way to the States yet. Jarvis hopes to someday change that, and simultaneously raise the snails’ market value.
Unlike clams, oysters, scallops, and other marketable shellfish, there are currently no limits on where or how much an individual can harvest slipper snails. “But once the state of Rhode Island figures out somebody can make money from them they’re gonna regulate them and you’d have to have a shellfish license,” Jarvis said.
If sea snails are an end-times food, at least I know I’ll be going out happy.
Until then, they’re fair game for anyone with access to the shore — which Jarvis predicts will only become more important as the economy keeps tumbling and our access to food grows more unstable and inequitable. Jarvis tells a story about New England during the world wars, when he says slipper snails were one of few protein sources for poor coastal dwellers. “When times were tough, people who didn’t have much knew about slipper snails,” he said. “It got a lot of people through tough times.”
It’s been a year dominated by “recession indicator” foods — foods the masses have learned to love that were otherwise quirky or out-of-bounds, like tinned fish, an industry that’s projected to hit $44.27 billion by 2030. Some might say slipper snails are more likely an apocalypse indicator — only entering the mainstream, as Levinton estimates, “100 years from now, when there’s not many of us left, scrounging along the shore.” But while the rest of us still teeter on the edge of full-blown dystopia, these are already pretty desperate times for our oceans and the people who make their living harvesting from them.
New England’s iconic shellfish — its clams, lobsters, oysters, and scallops — have become harder and harder to come by in the wild. But resilient slipper snails are here to stay. “The future is possible for slipper limpets,” Standridge said. “They’re the definition of sustainable and they take pressure off other species.”
In many coastal communities, there’s a very real fear that someday there will be nothing left to fish. Jarvis believes that these snails, though they’ve been “considered worthless forever,” may be the thing that keeps fishers in the water.
They got me in the water, anyhow — waist-deep in Winnapaug Pond with Jarvis, to be specific, swallowing a raw slipper snail that he’d just shucked from its knobby gray shell. The meat was briny and bright. It kind of shimmered in my mouth, the taste equivalent of how a sequin looks. He sent me home with a full bag of muddy snails. I cleaned and shucked them individually in my sink, after prying them from one another with surprising force. It felt kind of barbarous considering the miracles they undertake to keep their stacks alive and in one piece against tall odds. But for as tightly as they clung to each other, once they were separated, they practically slipped out of their shells with an easy sweep of a pocketknife.
With Standridge’s voice in my head, I prepared them the way I would normally do clams: in a lemon, butter, shallot sauce over bucatini. I made the mistake of overcooking them a bit, a little out of fear, so they lost some of their delicate flavor. But they were still sweet and perfectly chewy, just like all the more familiar shellfish I learned to love from an early age. If sea snails are an end-times food, at least I know I’ll be going out happy.
