Eels and snails are truly special delicacies. They are the most tender side dishes to go with wine. You can find many recipes in China regarding how to prepare eels and snails.

However, those who love to eat eels and snails must have heard the saying left by their ancestors that don’t eat the head of eels and don’t eat the tail of snails.

However, do we all know why this food taboo exists?

Why can't eels eat their heads?

Among the folk food taboos, there is a view to advise future generations not to eat the heads of eels and the tails of snails.

Although everyone does this, they don’t know why, and sometimes they become lazy when doing it.

After all, eel is easier to handle. Just chop off the eel head. However, snails are not big and there are many in total. You need to wash them many times before eating them and chop off the tails one by one. It is really time-consuming.

It’s too troublesome to get up.

Originally, the ingredients were heated to high temperatures before they appeared on everyone's dinner tables. Continuous high temperatures are enough to kill the nutritional spores in the food.

Although eels and snails are easily infected with a large number of sparganoides in domestic water, they can be almost completely cured after being boiled in high-temperature water.

It is easy for everyone to overlook the food taboo of not eating the head of eels and the tail of snails.

Naturally, many people follow this taboo. Everyone is curious about whether it is necessary not to eat eel heads and snail tails. Some people on the roadside do not chop off the tails of snails, and whether the snails produced are very dirty.

Why don’t snails eat their tails?

The snails are very large, usually about the size of a young egg, and the larger ones are as big as a goose egg.

We all know that field snails mainly feed on aquatic plants, zooplankton, and deteriorated organic debris.

When we eat snails, we usually clean them first, then boil them in water and then pick them up. Then the lid of the snails is opened, and we can easily use wooden skewers to remove the hard meat inside.

Pick out.

In fact, eating snails means eating this hard piece of meat.

Sometimes I pick out the hard meat of the snail and even the intestines inside.

The intestines are black, gray or red, and are particularly soft and thin. They are all waste products produced by the snails, so this thing is not something to be desired.

Therefore, when eating snails, the tail of the snail is where the digestion and detoxification system of the snail is located, and it is full of waste products produced by the snail. Therefore, these things at the tail of the snail cannot be eaten.

In fact, field snails should be better. After all, field snails will pick out the meat when eating, but stone snails are different.

The whole stone snail will be steamed out when eaten. The prepared stone snail is called "soy snail" here.

Before making the snails, we also need to cut off the tail end of each stone snail with scissors, and then wash it with tap water.

In fact, the purpose of doing this is to clean away the dirt at the end.

The same goes for eating snails. You only eat the hard piece of meat, but the contents inside are not edible.