With the world population crisis, more and more food will be needed, faster than farmers can raise it. Sooner or later, people will have to turn to the sea for nutrition--and some already have.
We're talking about seaweed, also known as sea vegetables. If you live on either of the two Coasts, you've seen it floating in the ocean, felt it brushing you while you're swimming or wading. "I'd never eat that stuff1x" you might protest. But chances are you already have.
In Japanese restaurants, the green vegetables you find wrapped around most types of sushi, and those floating in miso soup, are sea vegetables. Korean fruit and vegetable stores sell sea vegetable-and-grain snacks, and the most authentic Chinese restaurants offer sea cucumber soup. Jamaicans often eat Irish sea moss along with their curried goat and breadfruit. And even if you've never eaten any of these things, common gels, like jelly candies, are prepared using agar, another sea vegetable.
There are hundreds of types of sea vegetables. Many have Asian names, like nori, wakame, kombu. Others go by more anglicized monikers, like dulse and kelp. Paul Sieswerda, curator of the New York Aquarium in Brooklyn, says seaweed is found mainly in northern climates. "In the U.S., the most famous is the giant kelp found in California, which can reach up to 100 feet in length. On the East Coast, the rocky coast of Maine is just covered with seaweed," he says.
"We've had this stuff off our coasts for a long time--only no one paid attention to it until recently," says Boris of Integral Yoga Natural Foods in New York.
An important thing to remember about sea vegetables is that they're incredibly rich in nutrients, especially minerals. According to information distributed by Integral Yoga, dulse has the highest concentration of iron in any single food source, while one serving of hiziki supplies 14 times the amount of calcium in a glass of milk. Kelp is extremely high in potassium, and they're all rich in iodine. For more nutritional information, see
