Eating Conch

I had my first taste of conch the other day. After the students left the center, all the staff went out for dinner to celebrate a successful session. Since it was my first opportunity to sample local cuisine, I thought it appropriate to order the famous TCI dish.

I found this picture online after I ate it the other night. I'm not sure I would have been so quick to try it with this picture in my mind.

Conch is a large shellfish, sort of like a giant underwater snail, that is a popular food throughout Caribbean nations. I can't say that escargot sounds very appealing to me, but conch is so large and prepared so differently that it doesn't really resemble it. The way I had it was sliced into strips, breaded and fried. It tasted just like fried clams to me. It wasn't bad, but I'm not sorry that I won't be eating it every day.


Conch "fishing" used to be a very popular activity in this area, but it's been greatly reduced by a decline in conch population and the establishment of Marine Protected Areas. The beaches in the area, however, show just how extensive it once was. They are littered with harvested shells; massive piles line the shores of Long Cay. I was told that there are two explanations for why the fishermen took the effort to pile the shells instead of just throwing them back in the water. The first is that the "fishermen" feared that live conch would see the empty shells of dead conch and be frightened off. The second, and more likely, explanation is that the fishermen would mistakenly try to harvest discarded shells.

The method for removing the meat of a conch from it's shell is quite interesting, though I haven't seen it in practice yet. There's a place on the pointed end of the shell, down two spines from the top where the conch gets "knocked" (see the picture below). Basically, a hole is cracked in the shell using a machete (before machetes, they used the point of another conch shell), and the ligament that attaches the animal to the shell is cut with a knife. It can then be pulled out through the opening in the shell with ease. More than 99% of the shells on the beaches have this done to them. If you find one without it, it means that it died of natural causes. If you find one with a round hole, instead of the oblong hole made by a machete, it is possibly very old, from the time before machetes. I've been told that it's illegal to take conch shells out of the country to haven't been "knocked" because they don't want people killing them for souvenirs.


As I understand it, it takes something like 3 to 5 years for them to get to full size and could live to about 30 years. It's possible to catch your own conch if you get a fishing license (which I plan to do when the next season begins), but today most of them are farmed. It sounds like a reasonable (and sustainable) way to utilize conch as a food source, but I wonder about the ecological effects of farming them (I know salmon farming is pretty harmful). There's a large conch farm in Providenciales (I think it's there), which hopefully, I'll get a chance to visit.