The goose barnacle — percebes in Spanish and Portuguese, also called the gooseneck or leaf barnacle — is a stalked crustacean that lives cemented in dense colonies to rock on the most violent, wave-pounded stretches of the Atlantic shore. Each animal is a thick, rubbery, scale-clad stalk topped by a small armoured head of white plates, and it is the stalk that is eaten: a short plug of pink-grey meat that tastes of the open sea more purely than almost any other food — intensely briny, faintly sweet, clean and mineral. It is among the most prized and most dangerous shellfish in Iberia, gathered at great personal risk by the percebeiros of Galicia and Portugal and sold for extraordinary prices.