I followed him behind a flower bed to an old plastic paint tray set on top of a plastic crate that was turned upside down over an old plastic bucket—not a store-bought plastic bucket, which wouldn’t have suited Jean-Charles’s sense of frugality, but one that had once held some kind of remodeling project goop. Behind the bucket towered two oil barrels, which saved Jean-Charles fifty dollars a year off his water bill by collecting rain. I was still looking around for the snail farm when Jean-Charles picked up the paint tray.

Glistening pale flesh oozed up around the holes in the plastic crate as half a dozen snails tried to squeeze their bodies through the bars of their cell. Jean-Charles flipped the crate right side up and plucked these escapees off without even an instant’s hesitation about touching them. He dumped them back in with the rest, and I peered down at nearly a hundred snails, crawling over each other at the bottom of the bucket, crawling up the sides, drawn into their shells, or sprawled out sloppily. Or . . . doing some other things, I think. I’m not an expert on snail interactions, but I’m pretty sure I glimpsed snails in more positions than I was old enough to see.

“I put them in there to fast,” Jean-Charles explained.

I eyed him sidelong. My previous experience with fasting consisted of Good Fridays, Ash Wednesdays, and any week prior to wearing a bikini, and these acts seemed entirely too ritualistic for the mob of slime below me.

“For a couple of weeks,” he added. “Not less than a week. Empties out their intestines.”

If one thing is vital in the process of preparing snails, it is, as I would learn, emptying out their intestines. “You see that slime they leave when they move?” Jean-Charles asked, no doubt referring to the sticky brown-green, unpleasantly puke-colored trails on the bucket and other snails’ shells. “You don’t want to eat that.”

No, I didn’t. In fact, now that I got a closer look at the raw material, I was beginning to regret that snail in French Polynesia.

“Slime,” Jean-Charles said, “is not one of the better flavors. Which you’d know if you ever got a mouthful of an improperly cleaned snail.” He poured the snails from the bucket into the plastic crate as he spoke.

“It’s good I have you here to help me; this is usually a long job.” I jumped, but he didn’t notice. “First we have to wake them up and make sure they’re all still alive and worth eating.” He dipped the empty bucket into one of the rain barrels and dumped water over the plastic crate full of snails. “The water gets them to stick their heads out.”