Alive Alive Oh
Here’s a BBC recipe for steamed cockles. I’ve never seen a cockle, never eaten one, never even saw one on the menu. According to the Epicurious Food Dictionary, “They have a tendency to be quite gritty and must be washed thoroughly to rid them of sand,” which probably accounts for their dismal popularity in the US.
Even less appetizing: Pacific Coast cockles are likely to contain saxitoxins, which have been linked to PSP (Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning), the less evil-sounding ASP (Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning), as well as the downright folksy "Bitter Crab Disease."
But in the UK, they are harvested fearlessly (albeit by slave labor) even as Mad Cow Paranoia shrouds the kingdom, enveloping it with fear levels comparable to that of The Blitz. The culprit is the quaint Romanticism in that silly Irish folk tune about fishmonger Molly Malone and her stupid little wheel barrow. People have died for dumber things.
6:22:45 PM 
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