“Seaweed Chronicles: A World at the Water's Edge" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill).The book tells the story of how seaweeds are grown and harvested in the world's oceans and of their importance for a variety of purposes, including an extract in food and other products, helping fight climate change by sequestering carbon, their future use as a possible biofuel, and even the very future of fishing and farming itself.
Seaweeds are linked to the oldest organisms on the planet. "There is something called cyanobacteria, a bacterium that suddenly appeared and had the capacity to do photosynthesis," Shetterly says. "People who studied seaweeds called it a microalgae, a one-celled alga. But people who didn't study seaweeds called it a bacterium. It was and is a bit of both. Nonetheless, it was the first living thing floating in the ocean. Then it was joined by a microalgae, and what they did was to send little puffs of oxygen into the atmosphere. Without them we wouldn't have oxygen to breathe."
Paul Molyneaux, who has written about commercial fishing for The New York Times and who won the 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship to study sustainable fisheries in several countries: "We don't know how to assess the value of species within their ecological community. So, we tend to think of them as worthless rather than priceless." Seaweeds, as many cultures around the world have known for centuries, have tremendous economic value.
Worldwide seaweed harvests are valued at $6 billion a year. The majority of that, $5 billion, is in food for humans. The rest represents seaweed extracts for a wide range of uses. 35 countries harvest seaweed. China and Indonesia are the largest producers of seaweeds grown in aquaculture farms. The United States and Europe are quickly catching up. Maine is fast becoming the largest seaweed producer of edible and commercial seaweeds in the United States.
It is almost impossible to go through a day without encountering seaweed. Its uses, Shetterly says, fall into two broad categories: processed foods and processed non-foods. Many processed non-foods contain seaweed. These include toothpaste, cosmetics, soaps, medicines, pet foods, cattle feeds and farm fertilizers.
Seaweed farms could become the answer to food crises as the world's population continues to expand. Without the need for land resources, fresh seaweed has the potential to become one of the most sustainable crops on the planet. "Seaweed gives us an opportunity to do things better than we have in the past..."
(via What you don't know about seaweed | MNN - Mother Nature Network)
