Cephalopods

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

cephalopods a category of marine molluscs, many of which are important as food: notably squid, cuttlefish, and octopus. All these lack allure; they look like bags with heads on top and eight or ten arms or tentacles sprouting therefrom; and the name cephalopod, which is of Greek derivation, itself means ‘head-footed’. This construction, which is entirely logical for the kind of life they lead, appears strange, even repugnant, to most human eyes, and accounts for the widespread but diminishing reluctance to eat them.