Ocean Watch

Friday, January 24, 2003

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Years ago, during one of our first visits to Hilo, my husband and I went grocery shopping in the center of town. We laid our purchases on the conveyor belt, and when the first item reached the cashier, she looked at us, looked at the package and looked back at us. "Why you buy?" she asked, tapping the item.

I was a student at the time and had learned about this food source in my invertebrate zoology class. "To eat," I said.

"You know how to cook 'em?"

"We were going to eat them raw."

"No," she said, wagging her finger. "Steam 'em. You won't like 'em raw."

"Really? How long do you steam them?"

"Couple minutes only," she said.

"No," someone piped up from behind us. "Twenty minutes. Get more tender."

Someone else in the line offered another suggestion, and a discussion ensued. Checking out had ground to a halt, but no one seemed to mind. It was more important to get these malihini clued in about opihi.

I was particularly interested in opihi at the time because a month earlier I'd found a dozen empty shells among the rocks on Lanai. The big, hatlike shells had smooth pearly insides that gleamed in the sunshine and reminded me of tiny teacups.

Why I found so many limpet shells lying among the rocks I did not know, but my professor soon filled me in: In Hawaii, limpets are a delicacy called opihi. Those who like their taste sneak up on these snails, pluck them from the rocks and eat them on the spot.

Since then, I've learned a lot about limpets. Hawaii hosts four species found nowhere else in the world. One is the giant opihi, always submerged, and another is a resident of Hawaii's Northwest Chain only. The other two, called the black-foot opihi and the yellow-foot opihi, are the ones people eat.

Limpets graze on algae that grow on rocks. Most of these hardy snails live on Windward Oahu shores where the splashing waves foster algae growth (and also wash some opihi pickers to their deaths). Limpets can also, however, live on calm shores. If people didn't harvest these snails, we would see them just about everywhere algae grow on rocks.

A reader e-mailed me that years ago he explored a rocky shoreline on the Pacific coast of Japan and found huge opihi clinging to the rocks. He was about to pluck them off and eat them when his traveling companion convinced him otherwise. If these limpets were good to eat, the friend reasoned, the Japanese would not have passed them up.

"Did my friend save me from a week of gastric distress," the reader asks, "or did he deprive me of a source of succulent limpets for the rest of my stay?"

I called a friend from Tokyo who loves seafood. He told me he doesn't eat those snails because they're bitter and make him feel sick. Limpets are sold in Tokyo markets, though, so some people there eat them. Never raw, though, he said.

After we left that Hilo market, we steamed our opihi first a little and then a lot. Regardless of how we cooked it, though, neither of us liked this local treat.

But we were crazy about Hilo hospitality. In sharing their recipes, the people in the store that day shared their aloha and made us feel welcome.

To this day, we hold a warm spot in our hearts for Hilo.

But we never developed a taste for opihi.