FRUITS DE MER. Sounds tasty, doesn’t it? Fruits of the sea. Well, it sounded pretty good to me when I ordered it — “frooets dee myergh” — at a swish London restaurant recently. I imagined there might be a little tuna involved, a spot of salmon, maybe a morsel of steamed lobster. Plus I’d have the added benefit of impressing Helen, my pretty dining companion, with my command of French. Right.

“Fruits of the sea,” it turned out, was a misleading name. The dish should have been called “Things found under a rock.” There were oysters. A forlorn-looking crab. Some bluebottle-size shrimp things that were meant to be eaten whole — legs, head, poop-shoot, and all. And then there were the snails. A whole variety of grim little garden pests. And not just little ones. There were huge snails, Attack of the Killer Snails–size snails.

Since we were about to spend the better part of a day’s pay for this plate of seafaring vermin, I thought I’d take a stab at eating some of it. My game plan was to tackle the atrocious stuff while I still had an appetite and work my way round to the merely horrible. It was easy. All I had to do was suppress the urge to vomit.

I’VE ALWAYS been a fussy eater. As a child, I would drive my mother to despair with my culinary nitpicking. “What’s that?” I’d say, prodding a glob of spinach. “Eat it,” my mother would respond, but with little conviction. Greens, as she well knew, fell into the category of snot, and so were summarily shoved to the side of my plate. Nor did potatoes escape my diligent eye. I was a little diamond dealer, turning the spuds this way and that, pointing out the many warts and melanomas. “What’s that?”

Having dispatched the veggies, I would start in on the meat products. I’d take a sausage or a burger and pick it apart, my brow pinched in a mixture of concentration and disgust. “Ugh,” I’d groan, gesturing at something that resembled a nostril or a lip or an anus. This was generally the point when my mother would scrape the entire plate into the trash can, cuff me around the head, and slap a finger-dimpled peanut-butter sandwich on the table before me.

Sandwiches were fairly safe territory. It’s difficult, after all, to hide a snout or a testicle between two slices of bread. But one day even this truce was shattered. My mother had served up a plate of sandwiches, cut into triangles, buttered just so. They were tasty enough, but after a few bites I realized that I couldn’t identify what was in them. I pried the bread apart to get a better look. “What’s that?” I held the pinky-brown substance up to the light. And then I saw them. Taste buds.

The Tongue Incident still looms large in Wright family lore. For one thing, it was one of the few occasions when my mother fought back. She was a single parent, and it was a struggle to put any food on the table, let alone fresh meat. The tongue was probably meant as some sort of treat, and my rejection of it did not go over well. Eat the sandwich. No. Eat it. No. So it went, backwards and forwards. There was shouting, tears, the threat of real violence. In the end, I went to bed hungry.

Being a fussy eater was never easy. Shortly before the Tongue Incident, our school cafeteria had served up its dreaded goulash. School meals were never gourmet fare, but the goulash was sublimely awful: hunks of scabby carrot and slicks of soggy cabbage floating in a fetid broth, and, drifting hideously on the surface, the gobs of fat that passed for meat.

This particular day, a teacher named Mr. Deere decided to teach me a lesson — a first for him, I think. “Eat it,” he said, nodding at the accident scene on the side of my dish. “You’re not going anywhere until that plate is empty.” I put a lump of gristle in my mouth, swallowed, and promptly discharged a tsunami of brown fluid all over Mr. Deere’s corduroys. For years I couldn’t touch a stew — Hungarian or otherwise — without submitting it to a full autopsy. The very sight of fat left me gurgling with horror. My fear of food became a full-blown phobia.

IN RECENT years, I’ve done what you’re supposed to do with a phobia: confront it head on. In the past six months alone I’ve eaten tripe, tendon, squid, and boiled kidney. You could even say I’m one of those people who will eat anything. I may not enjoy it, but by God I’ll eat it.

These fruits de mer, though, were something else. These mollusks — these paradigms of gristle — were going to set me back 25 years, I just knew it. I thought of Mr. Deere standing over me, his crotch inches from my face. Eat it. I wrenched the largest of the snails from its shell and sat with it dangling from my fork. Eat it. There was slop on it, dark areas just beneath the surface. Eat it.

In an attempt to buy myself some time, I waved over a waiter. “Are these dead?” I asked. “Quite dead,” the waiter said, giving me a look. Helen also gave me a look. Unable to give myself a look, I gave the snail a look and put it in my mouth. It was like chewing on a fist. Amazingly, I got the snail down, and kept it down. Then I regarded the other bottom-dwelling delicacies on my plate — the insecty shrimps, the booger-like periwinkles. No. I couldn’t. I couldn’t go through with it.

“Finished, sir?”

“What?”

“Are you finished, sir?” It was the waiter.

“Oh, yes. Finished.”

And that was that. No tears. No guilt. No retribution.

If there’s a point to this story, it’s this: Mr. Deere was a fucking asshole.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: June 21-28, 2001