Three Rights Make a Left

Skin Moisturizer Contains WHAT?

A few weeks ago, I talked about putting in a golf driving range in our cow pasture. Initially I had planned on putting yardage signs on T-posts every fifty yards, but cattle are notorious for tearing things up so I was hesitant to invest in something that I would consume time and expense.

Then a guy I buy barrels from put an ad on Facebook Marketplace for barrels for $5 each. I made a note to go and pick some up to use as yardage signs form my driving range. A couple of days passed, and he posted barrels for $3 each. This really got my attention, but I was pretty busy and soon forgot to go by and pick some up. A couple more days passed, and I guess the guy got desperate to get rid of barrels on his place just south of the town of Campbell, Texas, because his next post was for “Free Barrels”. In his ad he stressed that they were non food grade and could only be used for trash cans or things that weren’t for human or animal consumption. I have bought a lot of barrels from him in the past to use for food barrels, trash cans and the like. Most of the time I have had great results, but I have bought some with removeable lids in the past that have contained ingredients to make cosmetics that were almost impossible to wash out. I didn’t really care what was in them since I planned to fill them with water, paint yardage numbers on them, and set them out in the pasture.

I loaded up my trailer and headed to my friend’s place about five miles north of us to pick up barrels. Along with the free barrels I bought several with lids and a couple of 300-gallon totes. I actually had to make two loads in all.

When I got home, I set out to start rinsing out the barrels and turning them into golf yardage markers. I read the labels, intending to look up whatever they had contained to make sure that when I put water in them, they wouldn’t explode on a hot Texas day. What I read on the labels came as a surprise. All of the barrels, over a dozen of them, had contained “snail slime.” I had to read it a couple of times to make sure that I had read that right. I was intrigued, so I googled “uses for snail slime” and found that it is a common ingredient in beauty products as a natural moisturizer. As I thought about it, I recalled that there were dozens and dozens of barrels that had probably contained “snail slime” besides the ones I came home with. And those were likely from one of many locations that use “snail slime” across the country.

I was intrigued. “How do snail ranchers harvest snail slime?” Another Google search revealed the answer to that question. When I typed in a search “How is snail slime harvested?” these are the exact words that came up. I kid you not: “The slime is commercially harvested by stressing harvested snails, such as by poking them with a stick, or by feeding them salty water.” My immediate question was how many times to you have to poke a snail with a stick to fill up a 55-gallon barrel with snail slime? I’m guessing thousands and thousands, and that is just one barrel.

My next question was what unfortunate soul’s career path led them to be a slime rancher who pokes snails with a stick all day every day to put moisturizer in your face cream? This sounds like a story for Mike Rowe from the TV show Dirty Jobs.