Kale of the Sea

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized, so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for a Pure Leaf.

Thumbtack presents project paralysis.

I was cornered.

Sweat gathered above my furrowed brow and my mind was racing.

I wondered who would be left standing when the droplets fell.

Me or the clawed sink.

Drain cleaner and pipe snake clenched in my weary fist.

I stepped toward the sink and then...

Wait, why am I stressing?

I have thumbtack.

I can easily search for a top-rated plumber in the Bay Area, read reviews, and compare prices, all on the app.

Thumbtack knows homes.

Download the app today.

It's not seaweed, it's sea vegetables.

Sea vegetables.

Welcome to Gastropod.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

We are so glad you could join us for another Gastro adventure, exploring the science and history of food.

So you may have eaten seaweed before.

Uh, hello, Cynthia.

Didn't you just hear it's not seaweed?

We're supposed to call it sea vegetables.

Oh, right.

Sorry, sea vegetables.

But if we do and somebody just kind of drops in, they're not going to know what we're talking about.

So

shouldn't we use seaweed?

Yeah, no, fair enough.

Seaweed it is.

Sorry, Chef Elaine Sweener.

Anyway, weeds are food too, as we learned in our last episode on subnatural cuisine.

They absolutely are.

So you may have eaten seaweed in a Japanese restaurant with sushi or in a seaweed salad, but seaweed is not just for Asian food.

It's been eaten for, well, as long as people have lived along coastlines all around the world.

We will learn about that.

And we'll also hear from a scientist in the US who developed a whole new seaweed farming process.

He did a ton of research on kelp biology from spore to seaweed to speed up their growth curve.

And he's now growing an entire seaweed farming industry on the East Coast.

So since this whole story is about farming in the ocean, shall we start on a boat?

What do you think?

I think that's a great idea.

You can just see the buoys out there right now.

So here we are on a boat called the Cory Alexander and it's a working fishing boat owned by Donald King or DJ as he's known.

We're heading out to see his kelp farm.

It's off the coast of Brantford, Connecticut in this gorgeous archipelago called the Thimble Islands in Long Island Sound.

DJ told us that Captain Kidd supposedly buried his treasure here.

Gary Trudeau, the Doonesbury cartoon artist, owns a whole island here.

And for the past two years, DJ King has had a kelp farm here.

It's fairly close in.

It's just

easy to access and it's kind of a little bit out of the weather, the big storms and weather.

I told Charlie that's

the biggest the biggest trick to this

is getting in a spot where you don't storms don't take your seaweed away.

Well, we take a look at what DJ is doing here in Long Island Sound.

He is a 3D farmer.

He's using the entire water column to grow different crops.

Right, we have oysters out here.

We have the kelp.

We had scallops out here a little bit.

The other voice you just heard is Charles Yarish.

He's a scientist at the University of Connecticut.

He's the huge innovator in seaweed farming we were talking about.

And he's the reason there's kelp out here with DJ's oysters in the first place.

You'll hear more about the science a little later, but first, we wanted to see the kelp in the water.

Well, there actually wasn't much to see.

They just seeded the line a few days before with spores, the size of a pinhead.

Hi, Robert, you ready?

And DJ's crew pulled up the line so quickly and then dropped it back in the water so quickly that I almost missed it.

Yeah, they look okay.

You know?

Does it look okay?

I did miss it entirely where I was standing.

It was like, it was up, it was down, I didn't even see anything.

I had to ask you, Nikki, if you'd seen seaweed at all.

I did, but, you know, barely.

You could see this thin kite line that the seed came on, and it was wound around the larger rope that was attached to the buoys.

And it was basically like a brown fuzz.

A bunch of it came off in Charlie's hands by accident.

So now, just where are we?

What did we just look at?

That was the kelp line.

It's a long,

it stretches from buoy to buoy to buoy to buoy,

and it's suspended three feet below the water surface.

Before we went out there, I wondered if a seaweed farm was a big nuisance to folks on the shore, but it wasn't, at least not visually.

It looks just like some buoys in the water.

The lines hang between the buoys under the surface.

You can't really see anything until you're on top of it.

And so eventually, last year, we had long kelp off that line.

It was so heavy you could hardly lift the line up, even when it's not blowing.

So, I got a question.

Are your neighbors curious about this?

Do you find other fishermen or other lobster men out here like, huh, they want a piece of this now, or they think you're crazy?

Some think you're crazy.

The neighbors were far enough out, so the neighbors, they had, there were some neighbors that had concerns because they don't have the, you know, sometimes when you don't have the knowledge of what's going on, you might think that it's, you know, going to hurt the environment or maybe someone's going to think they're going to run into the lines or something.

But

for the most part,

I think everyone's supportive of it.

The lines here are spread out over an area about the size of a football field, and they'll be able to harvest about eight tons of kelp from them in the spring.

DJ had heard about Charlie Yarish's work with seaweed farms in Maine and elsewhere in the Thimble Islands, and he reached out and soon got started himself.

This will be his third season.

He already does a variety of ocean harvesting in addition to lobster and oysters.

In fact, he's had to diversify.

There was a lobster die-off in his area, and this is likely going to be a bigger problem in the future with climate change as waters get warmer.

You know, we catch blackfish, tow talk,

you know, we have bluefish nets, and

but this really fills a nice niche for us because it's more of a wintertime thing.

Our summers are the very busiest with all the work that we do, so this helps us in the slow time.

You know, maybe that's that is another reason why I actually got involved with this because it was a wintertime project.

Hopefully, this year we'll be able to start harvesting a little bit earlier in March.

Of the things you farm, is kelp the hardest or the easiest or it's got its own peculiarities?

I thought kelp, and I've told Charlie and his group this a few times, I think kelp is one of the easiest things I've done.

When we got back to land, Charlie told us that for DJ, this is a working farm, but for him, it's a research project.

He and his colleague John Kim try to get out there every few weeks in the growing season.

I said to him, well, we'll provide the seed for you if you're going to be part of our research team.

And these are the requirements.

requirements we want to be able to get the access to your farm throughout the growing seasons.

They're looking at the nitrogen content of the seaweed, how fast it's growing, all that kind of stuff.

On this trip Charlie wasn't really expecting to see anything because the kelp had only been seeded a few days ago.

He just needed to check that the line was tight.

But he'll be back in a few weeks to see how the kelp is growing.

From the time that we seed, one millimeter in size, the size of a pinhead, from the time of harvest, our plants will be at harvest time nine feet in length.

And that is in five months to six months.

So, what's interesting is that the kelp have this whole strategy.

They suck up all the nitrogen in December, January, and February, while other organisms in coastal waters are mostly offline, so they don't have to compete as much.

And by the time the daylight and temperature gets back up in March, that's when the plankton and other creatures start chowing down, and by that point, the kelp is set.

And that's why it's so critical for us to get our plants out as quickly as possible in the fall so we can maximize that growth at the beginning of their life cycle so they can

suck up those nutrients in the dead of winter

and they will just grow like blue blazes in the months of late March, April and May.

Okay, so this is great.

The seaweed fits in really nicely with the ecosystem and with what DJ is already doing and he can use his boat and his crew in the off months when he doesn't have much work otherwise.

And he can make some more cash.

His industry isn't an easy or secure one, I'll give him that.

But it doesn't seem super revolutionary.

In some ways it isn't, right?

They already grow a shit ton of seaweed in China.

In fact, kelp farming techniques were developed in Asia.

It's much, much bigger.

In China, there are kilometers and kilometers of

kelp aquaculture.

That was Iona Campbell.

She's a Scottish scientist working on how to scale up kelp farming off the coast of Scotland.

There's actually a lot of things that will have to change.

Unfortunately, a lot of things as part of the Chinese kelp cultivation is done by hand.

So almost every single kelp individual is moved twice in its lifetime by one person.

So it's quite a labour-intensive process they have.

This is the whole point of Charlie's work.

We could never compete with Asian seaweed farms just because of all those labour costs.

So DJ's farm here, the one hidden a a few feet under the buoys, it is actually revolutionary.

It's among the first modern seaweed farms in the Northeast, and it all came about because of innovations and discoveries in Charlie Yarish's lab at the University of Connecticut's Stanford campus.

So after we got back to shore, we hopped in the car and drove another hour south to Stanford.

So here's the thing you need to understand.

Charlie literally wrote the book on seaweed science.

The 600-page book.

It took five years for Charlie and his colleagues to put it together.

And it had to do with the ecophysiology and the biogeography of seaweeds.

This was a world view of seaweeds, where they grow and why they grow, what are the environmental factors that trigger their growth.

And we put a phenomenal amount of information together that up until that time, there wasn't a book like that.

After that, Charlie swore that he was never going to do a book project again.

Of course, he did end up writing another book.

But Charlie wanted to do more than just add to scientific knowledge.

I always had this idea, what's the application?

Why are they important?

Ecological importance, I can understand that.

How can you take that ecological importance and look at practical importance?

How can you make what you're doing relevant to the common person on the street?

Charlie looked at the six and a half million tons of seaweed being farmed in Asia, and he thought we should be able to farm seaweed here in the U.S.

But as we heard from Iona, we can't compete with Asians on price if the labor is so intensive.

Charlie had two ideas.

One, he wanted to create an entirely new market for a new product, fresh seaweed, instead of the dried stuff we buy from Asia.

We'll hear more about that later.

But even more crucial, he thought he could futz with seaweed biology so that it just grows much faster here.

From his research, he knew that we have relatives of all the popular Asian edible seaweeds right here in the U.S.

And he knew everything about their growth and reproduction.

So he just took all of that information and he invented an an entirely new process.

So, Charlie's process starts by harvesting kelp reproductive organs from the wild and then getting them in the mood by recreating the motion of the ocean.

In fact, when we went to the lab, Charlie's colleague Jang was busy doing exactly that.

The color is not, water is not super clear now, it's a little bit crowded.

You see that?

That means that they have some spores released.

Yeah, I think so.

I think so.

We were looking at them and now they've given

a better mood now.

They're performing.

God, we really need to get our minds out of the gutter.

Last month you heard about fungus sex, now we're on to seaweed sex.

And what type of plant or mushroom sex will you hear about next on Gastropods?

Stay tuned.

So, okay.

After the kelp reproductive organs do their thing, the next step is to get these baby kelp spores to grow really quickly.

So what did you do differently here that's different from what would happen in the wild?

We changed our temperatures as the plants were aging.

We changed our light level needs.

When kelp are just juveniles, for instance, they require very low light.

And then

as they are maturing, they require high light levels.

So we changed light, we changed the temperature, and then also

along the way we had to figure out our biggest problem has to do with nutrients.

He played with the level of nutrients too.

He basically ended up making kelp spores grow at warp speed up to the point where they can be seeded out in the ocean.

I was able to take a spore of the kelp that's produced and you've seen in my lab some of the tissue that produces the spores.

I was able to take those spores and then march those spores through their life cycle, not in two months or three months.

I was able to march them through in about 30 days.

That all took years to get right.

And now his lab looks like a Home Depot.

I'm not kidding.

It's filled with all of these Rube Goldberg style solutions.

So there are sawn-off PVC drain pipes to make these dark settling chambers.

Those are where the baby kelp attach themselves onto the spools of kite string in the dark.

The aquariums where they then grow the settled spores on the string until they're ready to go out into the ocean, those come from Petco.

And they have dozens of plastic rubber-made containers for storing and transporting the spools of seeded string out to the ocean.

But the final set of rooms Charlie showed us were the seaweed nurseries, and he's got baby seaweed there from all over.

There's sea lettuce from Baja California and different varieties from all over the U.S.

and the rest of the world and they're growing in glass jars and they were spectacularly beautiful.

Wow.

Wow.

Well, welcome to the world of algae.

We got different types of sea lettuce species right here.

We've got different gracelaria species from all over North America.

This beautiful green flowy like lettucey, is that edible?

Yes.

Oh, it's gorgeous.

Oh, yes, it is.

It was ridiculously beautiful.

They were just swirling around in there, these little bits of seaweed, like a lava lamp.

It was honestly stunning.

You will definitely want to go online to look at those photos.

So, Charlie took all his research into seaweed biology and he used it to figure out how to farm kelp in New England.

He started working first with Talif Olson in the Gulf of Maine in 2006.

You'll hear from Talif later on in this episode.

And now he's partnered with nine seaweed farmers.

When we were talking with him, one of the things Charlie kept coming back to is the idea of the ecosystem benefits of farming seaweed.

So seaweed actually performs an important service in the water.

Remember when we told you how it sucks up all those nutrients in the winter?

So that may sound like a bad thing, right?

It's depleting the ocean.

But actually, it's sucking up the exact things that we put too much of into the ocean.

If you remember back to our episode talking with Chef Dan Barber, we talked about having too much nitrogen and phosphorus in the water for farming and how that causes the dead zone where all the fish die in the Gulf of Mexico.

And it's also, it's a huge issue all along the coastlines near cities.

There are nutrient issues from sewage plants and from fertilizer runoff and from manure on the ground, even from pets.

And all of these nutrients, they cause things like toxic algal blooms.

There was one this summer in Toledo, Ohio.

There was a bloom in Lake Erie, and they had to shut off water to the entire city.

When this happens on the coast, it also closes beaches and it makes shellfish toxic, so it shuts down oyster farming.

So seaweed farming could really help clean all that up.

What's crazy is not only is the seaweed clearing up all those excess nutrients from the water, but it's not taking up the stuff we don't want to eat, like heavy metals and PCBs and so on.

So it's still safe to eat it afterwards.

Charlie tested this out.

He grew some seaweed in New York City waters, which are really pretty nasty.

And even at our seaweed farm at the confluence of the Bronx River and the East River,

we actually found something out which blew us away.

We found out that the seaweeds at that particular site

actually were able to meet the FDA guidelines as an edible sea vegetable.

It was basically at a sewage outflow and there's a ton of industrial pollution in the water there, but the seaweed didn't absorb the toxins at all.

And in fact, the nutrients in the sewage caused the kelp at that site to grow to more than 10 feet.

The way the kelp sucks up these nutrients also makes it really handy for fish farms, where all of that fish poo causes a huge environmental problem.

In Scotland, Iona and her colleagues are testing out growing kelp alongside farm salmon.

The seaweeds are removing what we call the inorganic nutrients from the waste.

And they assimilate that into their tissue, and then you can remove that from the environment when you harvest the seaweed.

I find it interesting that it's gone full circle from how we can produce on a large scale fish for people to consume and now we're realising that what we have to do is recreate an ecosystem type system where everything that was present naturally is being present and utilized again in the aquaculture system.

Seaweed, it's good for the environment and it's also good for you.

In fact, people have been eating seaweed for thousands and thousands of years and using it as fuel and fodder for their domesticated animals and in a few minutes, you'll hear more about the seaweed-flavored sheep of the Orkney Islands and the roles that seaweed played in people first colonizing the Americas.

And I will go on a seaweed tasting trip to the culinary school Johnson and Wales.

They're developing new seaweed recipes there for the American market.

With the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you can earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase.

And you get big purchasing power.

So your business can spend more and earn more.

Stephen Stephen Brandon and Bruno, the business owners of SandCloud, reinvested their 2% cash back to help build their retail presence.

Now, that's serious business.

What could the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One do for your business?

Capital One, what's in your wallet?

Find out more at capital1.com/slash sparkcash plus.

Terms apply.

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

You know know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall?

You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back.

But somehow it doesn't do the trick, or it leaves you feeling even worse.

What you need is a quality break, a tea break.

And you can do that with Pure Leaf Iced Tea, real brewed tea made in a variety of bold and refreshing flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

With a Pure Leaf Iced Tea in hand, you'll be left feeling refreshed and revitalized with a new motivation to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a pure leaf iced tea.

Time for a tea break, time for a pure leaf.

So, for most people, when you think about seaweed, you think about sushi or seaweed salad, right?

Basically Asian food.

But there's a long history of eating seaweed in Northern Europe.

The Welsh have this puree made from seaweed called lava bread, which you can spread on hot buttered toast, or you can also coat it in oatmeal and fry it.

It looks like a cowpat and tastes delicious.

Off Galway on the coast in Ireland, there are archaeological remains of seaweed farms that are 7,000 years old.

And Iona Campbell, the Scottish kelp scientist, she told me the kelp has a long history in Scotland too.

Well, historically, in Scotland, what they used to do was they'd boil it with oats and they'd have it in a thick oat soup,

much like the porridge that we still eat today.

So, crofters and people who lived around the Outer Hebrides in Scotland would eat this.

They'd also fry it up, boil it, and then toss it in butter, which was also popular.

I think it was Bronze Age cremations, they found seaweed in the cremations and they used it as a fuel in the cremations.

Historically, seaweed was crucial to life in Northern Europe.

In Ireland and in the Scottish Islands, the land is poor and the weather is harsh, and it's a hunger food.

People foraged or farmed it to supplement what they could grow and they put it on the land as fertilizer and they burned it as fuel.

And like Iona says, it goes way back to the Bronze Age.

And beyond.

So I talked to an archaeozoologist who's an archaeologist who specializes in animals basically.

Her name is Ingrid Mainland and she's based at the University of the Highlands and the Islands in the Orkneys.

And she's traced back the use of seaweed there as a source of animal feed all the way back to the Neolithic.

So the way she figured this out is actually kind of funny.

She looked at the teeth of the sheep skulls found at Neolithic sites on the island.

If you eat seaweed and you're a sheep, you get a very different trace on the tooth surface than if you eat grass.

And this is all to do with the way that sheep eat and the abrasives that are ingested along with the food.

So if you're a seaweed eating sheep, because it's a gelatinous substance,

sheep find it a little bit more difficult to eat than grass and they tend to chew up and down instead of side to side.

So, to confirm this, she compared the marks on the 5,000-year-old sheep teeth with the teeth of the Orkneys famous seaweed-eating sheep today.

And it's true, sheep 5,000 years ago ate seaweed as food.

Wait, you're saying there are famous seaweed-eating sheep today?

Yeah, so farmers on the North Ronaldsy Island traditionally they've penned their sheep up on the shoreline to keep them from damaging the valuable arable land.

And what happened is the sheep became hooked on seaweed.

Today, interestingly, the North Ronaldsy sheep are something that is helping sustain the island of North Ronaldsey because they are a major tourist attraction.

Their meat is also much desired because it's a lean,

mature meat.

It has a nice taste of seaweed with it.

So I've actually been to the Orkneys, but I've never tasted this lamb and now I'm desperate to.

It sounds amazing.

It combines two tastes that I love.

And it's true, seaweed can and is still used as animal feed today.

Charlie even found a Mexican variety that he thinks would be great to farm as a feed for shrimp or fish.

Actually, talking about Mexican seaweed brings me to the other crazy thing I found out about seaweed's prehistory, which is that seaweed has also been found at one of the oldest sites of human habitation in the Americas.

It's a place called Monte Verde in Chile, and the oldest remains there go back to 33,000 years ago.

And the seaweed they found there changed basically everything we thought we knew about how humans first arrived in America.

So I called Jack Rawson.

He's an archaeobotanist who helped excavate the site originally.

He's on faculty exchange in Hawaii right now.

Nice.

Hard life.

I know, right?

So Jack was part of the original excavation of the site back in the 1970s.

So the thing that made this site so special, apart from its age, is that peat moss had covered it over and created this sort of oxygen vacuum seal that preserved all the plant life really well.

They found so many plant remains there, 72 different plant species they found.

And among them was our good buddy Seaweed.

The site is actually

30 kilometers from the nearest coastline, so we were surprised to find any seaweed at all.

And when we found the seaweed, we were really astonished to find four different species coming from different places, different coastlines.

Some of them are rocky coastline, some of them are sandy coastline.

So the species were very surprising.

And they're mostly found in a special area of the site away from the residential zone that we think was a medicine hut.

That the seaweeds were being used largely medicinally.

They were even being rolled up.

with a hallucinogenic plant, baldo, that was probably used in medicine as well.

They found all these like half-chewed cuds of seaweed and baldo with the tooth marks still in them.

And they also found a bit of seaweed in the residential section of the site, so Jack reckons it was used as food too.

But the craziest thing he told me is this.

Okay, so remember how when you learned in school that the first people in America came across a land bridge in the Bering Strait, came into Alaska, basically?

That is exactly what I learned.

Well, the fact you have a site this old and this well established, right at the southern tip of the the Americas, about as far from Alaska as you can get, doesn't sit very well with that theory.

Jack told me they actually got a lot of flack when they first proposed 33,000 years old as the date for this site.

But it led them to develop an entirely new theory.

So Jack and his graduate advisor, Tom Dillahaye, and a few others came up with something called the Seaweed Trail that they say explains how Monteverde could exist.

But the idea is that first, we have to explain this early site that far south in South America.

And

the idea is that instead of crossing the Bering Strait, early people came in on boats and came down the Pacific coast.

That's the best way to explain it.

And there's a lot of problems with the Bering Strait idea in general.

in terms of going through an ice-free corridor and

what's the geological evidence for an ice-free corridor and what would you eat in an ice-free corridor.

And what I say to my students is, well, you know, I'll give you a choice.

You can walk through the ice-free corridor, you can take the boat.

I'll meet you in America, and I'm taking the boat.

Because

there would have been more food

going the marine way?

Well, if you're coming by land through an ice-free corridor, you're going to have a lot of trouble with food resources.

You're going to go through many different environmental zones with unfamiliar resources.

If you come by boat, you've got constants, you've got fish, and one of the constant similar resources all the way down from Alaska all the way down to South America are very similar species of seaweed.

And that's where the idea of the seaweed trail comes from.

That

here's a nice, reliable, nutritious resource that doesn't change and it's available consistently all the way down the coast that would feed people who were traveling by boat looking for new areas to colonize.

That is not at all what I learned in school.

I love it.

Is this seaweed trail theory?

Is it widely accepted now?

I know, isn't it crazy?

So according to Jack, the boat theory of colonization is actually increasingly accepted and thought to be highly plausible.

There is more and more evidence actually that they're finding of shore settlements off the coast in present-day Washington and Oregon that back it up.

So you're sort of.

I mean, you're pretty much much saying that seaweed is one of the main reasons that people could colonize the Americas?

Uh, yeah, sure.

I would go there.

Who would have thought that the humble seaweed was so important in the history of these two continents?

But actually, you know, seaweed is still really important here today.

It has a lot of industrial uses, as Iona pointed out.

It's hidden in all sorts of foods and cosmetics and medicine.

Pharmaceutical companies and food companies use things called alginates, which is like a a jelly-like carbohydrate, which is used for its water-holding properties, gelling, and emulsifying things.

So they put it in things like meringues and ice creams and to improve the head on your beer.

You may even have seen that on food labels.

It goes by the name of Kerrageen.

That's what she's talking about.

And seaweed might even have a futurist fuel, like in those Bronze Age cremations.

Iona told me she's part of a team working on industrial scale seaweed production for biofuels.

They have a pilot scale plant on the west coast of Scotland right now.

But let's come back to the U.S.

What is going to happen to all that kelp that DJ is growing and all those other farmers that Charlie's working with?

So Native Americans, as we just heard, may have used seaweed to colonize the Americas, and I'm sure they had their own recipes, but we have no tradition of eating seaweed here.

The seaweed market is growing in the U.S., but that's mostly for Asian recipes.

Yeah, so Charlie and the other farmers he works with, they have a secret plan.

They want to create a market in the U.S.

for fresh, blanched, and then frozen seaweed.

It's completely different from the dried stuff.

Charlie told us he's buying a mobile squid processing unit from Korea, and all the farmers will be able to use it.

It'll move up and down the coast at harvest time.

And what it does is it cuts kelps into different widths into like a noodle or slaw, etc.

Cynthia, you got to try some, right?

You lucky thing.

I did.

It's true.

I drove down to Johnson and Wales.

It's about an hour south of Boston.

And I had set up a meeting with Elaine Sweener.

She's a professor there and she teaches the students about vegetarian cooking.

And she's also, she's a sailor and she's really into teaching healthful eating.

And she loved the idea of bringing, as she calls it, as you heard her say, sea vegetables into the curriculum.

So she had originally been working with dried seaweed and then she met Taliph Olson, who also came down to meet with me.

Now he is the first seaweed farmer Charlie worked with.

He's up in Maine.

He originally had a mussels farm and then he kind of transferred entirely to seaweed.

And he actually, he kind of sees himself more as a promoter even at this point.

He's trying to work with other farmers on the coast to grow seaweed.

He wants to develop the market, this market for fresh seaweed.

He's actually, it's kind of crazy, but he's been wanting to grow and market fresh seaweed since about the 1980s, weirdly enough.

But at the time, there wasn't a market.

So I watched the demographics for years and years and years.

And finally, I'm watching the market become ready for new products, the socioeconomic benefits, the sustainable benefits.

We've actually trademarked the term the virtuous vegetable.

Growing what's arguably the healthiest vegetable you can eat using no arable or tillable land, no fresh water, no fertilizers, no herbicides, no insecticides takes up CO2

and releases oxygen, which can help nullify ocean acidification.

It really doesn't get any better.

As you can hear, he's kind of this evangelist for seaweed.

Right, right.

But we know it's good for the environment, Charlie told us.

But is it good for you?

It is.

You know, so I was doing some guest hosting over at Inquiring Minds.

It's a science podcast, and I was actually promoting our kelp episode, and I was talking to Indre Viscontas, she's the co-host.

She told me her husband Adam thinks it's the most healthy vegetable possible.

And actually, I don't think Adam's so far off.

Taliff will go on and on about the health benefits, but it does seem to have all sorts of micronutrients that are good for you.

Trace elements like magnesium and selenium, and it's got iodine, and we don't get much iodine in our diets regularly, and it's got

lots of fiber in it.

And actually, one of the ways he's marketing it is for its health benefits, and he's marketing it as like an addition to smoothies for all these smoothies shops that are popular all over the U.S.

Oh, I could see that.

When in doubt, chuck it in a blender.

Exactly.

But you know, the one thing I remember Dan Barber saying to us that stuck with me is it doesn't really matter how healthy and environmentally friendly a food is if it isn't delicious.

So, what's the verdict?

What did you eat?

It's kind of crazy delicious, just the seaweed by itself.

If I had that in my house, it would be gone in a day.

There were four different kinds we had.

There were these kind of pureed seaweed frozen squares.

Those are the things you can throw into smoothies.

And actually, we did try a smoothie with some of that thrown in.

And then there are these little rounds.

They look like almost little scallion bits, but they're cut from the stems of the seaweed, and they're a little bit crunchier.

And then there's this slaw cut that you can mix into things.

And then there are these like really thin wraps of young seaweed.

that are really delicate.

And so we had four different dishes that we tried.

The first dish that Elaine cooked up was this tomato and roasted pepper soup, and she mixed in some seaweed and then sprinkled some of the crunchy stuff on top.

Stirring this a little bit so it'll get a little more evenly heated.

And then we shall, I'm going to reduce it a tad, and then we're going to add all of our condiments to it at the end.

So we'll see.

It's nice and shimmery.

Wow, the

stipes, it has

the crunch, the kind of, and it has that little bit of like the ocean flavor to them.

You can burst at the ocean.

In each little bite, you get a burst of the ocean.

And it's not, as you're saying, it's not super salty.

It's just this like kind of ocean sense.

It's very, very salty.

Okay, that's your first course taken care of.

Next up was salmon.

She took some salmon and doused it in honey mustard, and then she dipped that in this mixture of oats and sunflower seeds and wheat germ.

And then at the very end, she wrapped that in those seaweed wraps I was discussing earlier.

It's wonderful.

It's perfect.

Did the kelp do what you want?

I mean, I know what I love about it, but did the kelp do what you wanted to do for it?

I like the chewy texture and the smooth flavor.

It's not even a deep sea flavor.

It's more of a.

It pulls out the marine flavor to me, though, of the fish.

Like it, it does, it's not deep sea, but it kind of makes it

more of this marine sense to it.

It's amazing.

And I guess it's vegetables, so we have to skip dessert, right?

Not at all.

She actually, she used the slaw cut in this carrot and seaweed cake.

And then she took

those little squares.

She took those squares and mixed them into the frosting.

So it was a carrot and carrot seaweed cake with this kind of seaweed flecked cream cheese frosting.

The green makes it look like it's a carrot zucchini.

Yep, it's nice, it's really nice.

It's basic cream cheese, anyone's cream cheese frosting.

So I'm going to put a little at a time because I don't want to overly influence anything.

Okay.

Oh, look how pretty that is.

It's like Christmas.

Really pretty green flecks throughout the frosting.

Nice.

And once they get on there, they'll be gorgeous.

They're very, very moist.

Mmm.

So darn good.

And it's because the kelp is in there and it holds all the moisture so they never dry out.

You can even overbake them.

Don't do that.

But they are so moist.

Absolutely.

It is really moist.

Mm-hmm.

It was delicious.

We found that when we substituted it into the zucchini bread a couple years ago in one of the classes also, the same thing.

The kelp really kept it nice and moist.

This is amazing.

Okay.

I have to put down my mic so I can keep on eating.

Well, I am basically as green as a kelp smoothie right now from pure envy.

It sounds amazing.

It was absolutely delicious.

That might have been one of the best carrot and kelp, one of the best carrot cakes I've ever tasted.

But I have to say, I'm not sure that all Americans are ready for seaweed yet.

I think that Talif and Charlie and all those other farmers might have a little bit of work to do to develop the American market because Elaine sent me home with some of the cupcakes with the frosting on it.

And I gave a couple to Tim, my partner, and he took some to his office.

And a bunch of his colleagues wouldn't go near it because they knew there was seaweed in it.

Oh, that makes me so sad.

I know they missed out on such delicious cake.

You should have overnight expressed it to me instead, you know.

Next time.

And that's it for this episode of Gastropod.

And that is the official end of our very first season.

We'll be back in January on January 20th with a brand new episode to kick off a brand new season.

And we have some great things planned for our second season.

We've got livestock breeding, an artificial flavor, and lots and lots of cheese.

As usual, check us out online at gastropod.com where we've posted all kinds of links, photos, and extra information.

And you should really check out Nikki's photos of Charlie's Seaweed Nursery.

They are gorgeous.

We'll also have links to seaweed recipes and to a site where you can buy some seaweed to try for yourself.

While you're there, sign up for our email list to get new episode alerts.

And please feel free to like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter at Gastropodcast, and email us at contact at gastropod.com.

We are also on iTunes and Stitcher, or you can plug our RSS feed directly into your favorite podcasting app.

Hey, guess what?

Whether or not this was your first episode, now you get to go back and binge listen to the entirety of season one.

So much food, science, and history all in one go.

And thank you for listening.

See you in the new year.

You're basking on a beach in the Bahamas.

Now you're journeying through the jade forests of Japan.

Now you're there for your alma mater's epic win.

And now you're awake.

Womp womp.

Which means it was all a dream.

But with millions of incredible deals on Priceline, those travel dreams can be a reality.

Download the Priceline app today and you can save up to 60% off hotels and up to 50% off flights.

So don't just dream about that trip.

Book it with Priceline.