Banking on the Seaweed Rush
hakaimagazine.com
hakaimagazine.com
Seaweed farming needs:
- Massive ($10-20e12 USD) investment to make a dent in climate change, in the form of automated kelp processing ships AND genetic modifications/breeding to favor rapid growth. There is no possibility of a few artisanal farmers in skiffs doing anything measurable except selling small batches to $4000/jar cosmetics companies.
- Not enough people enjoy seaweed as a food because it's just not appetizing.
- Sequestration of carbon rather than free use of it in the carbon cycle. Pick a couple of underwater sacrificial deep ocean zones or pump liquified seaweed ash and combustion products underground.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-03-18/cows-fed-seaw...
Eating seaweed reduces cow methane by 86%. Thus, if every livestock animal on the planet ate seaweed in its diet, we might cut effective GHG output by 10% or so. That’s a huge dent in the problem.
I am not accounting for the CO2 emissions involved in seaweed harvesting.
Also note that, as far as methane goes (that’s what the cows burp), anthropogenic emissions are about 40% of the total.
This includes not only enteric methane (39% of that), but also emissions and deforestation to grow feed (45%), manure storage (10%), and meat processing and transport (6%).
Reducing global emissions by ~6% is still a huge dent, of course.
Hahaha. Not a sushi fan? Asians seem to like seaweed plenty. One way to help on this point would be to popularize (in the west) a snack that's already very popular in Asia: https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OJ-AD212_SEAWEE_FR...
This is one of the best sellers in Thai convenience stores.
Predator fish like Tuna can become heavier in toxins only because they are the top of a food chain gathering and concentrating said toxins.
Seaweed is just a plant. It grows, then dies if not harvested. It is no higher risk than wheat.
Laver might be the most delicious snack food I can imagine, it's just so difficult buy sustainably in the USA
True, as long as you pretend Asia doesn't exist.
But seriously, what's with the blatant cultural ignorance? If you're exposed to seaweed only later in life it may be off-putting, but for people who grow up with it, it's just another food.
Of course it's not really a staple food the way rice is, I'm just saying it can be a common side thing.
I looked into getting my hands on some seaweed to experiment with in the kitchen a while back. Unfortunately my ignorance is a bit of a non starter. We have fantastic Asian stores here in Berlin but deciphering the labels is a challenge for me. Both because I need glasses for the fine print, don't read Korean, and the English/German translations are not that meaningful to me either. I'd say that's the main challenge: ignorance. People simply don't know that they can buy it, where to buy it, what to buy and what recipes they can use it in. A solvable problem but a bit of a hurdle short term.
There are probably plenty of people that like me are curious enough that there is a market for this stuff. I buy food because I eat it, mainly. The whole carbon sequestration topic is a separate one for me.
The dried / nori is too dry and fragile to hold up in most dishes.
The rehydrated stuff you'll find in soups or wakame has a fairly novel texture that's good in small doses but I think would struggle to hold up as a substitute for most Western veggies.
That's just to get people to eat it. Then, you have fears over iodine overdosing (thyroid problems) and heavy metal contamination (probably? less of a concern).
It is also high in both potassium and vitamin K, which is hard on people with kidney issues or who are on blood thinners for heart problems.
All in all, I don't see it as being much more than a novel condiment outside of the dishes you already find it in (sushi, wakame, soup).
As for the health consequences and nutritional value. Loads of Asian people eat this very regularly and live quite long lives. Japan has had some people live very long and breaking age records. Also, it's a generally healthy population as far as I know. Of course add a bit of variety to your diet and don't over do it. Probably good advice for almost any food. I never meant to suggest to replace vegetables with sea weed.
In any case, I wasn't replying so much to whether or not it can be occasionally enjoyable in the right dishes, but the GP post of
> - Not enough people enjoy seaweed as a food because it's just not appetizing.
in combination with
> - Massive ($10-20e12 USD) investment to make a dent in climate change, in the form of automated kelp processing ships AND genetic modifications/breeding to favor rapid growth. There is no possibility of a few artisanal farmers in skiffs doing anything measurable except selling small batches to $4000/jar cosmetics companies.
I totally agree that more people should try it.
I totally disagree that human consumption is going to sufficiently drive commercial investment to the point of impacting climate change.
Taste is Ok to me (at least wakame), not something I would willingly indulge in daily or in larger amounts but I can see easily why nontrivial amount of people would have issues with it. Good luck trying to persuade small kids, 'ewwww gooooey' and bye.
Seaweed being unappetizing is learned behavior. It’s eaten across the world and most people wouldn’t find it unappetizing unless told it is.
It doesn't have to be monadically appetizing to be a delicious dietary staple.
Can we just agree that there are cultural differences in taste?
Hundreds of millions if not billions of people find seaweed quite appetizing. Such a normative statement is flat out wrong.
Basically, "this thing is good as long as we don't produce enough to actually make a difference".
This attitude is so stupid and self defeating.
"There's money to be made here. We must allow the corporations to take over and build 10,000-acre monoculture farms in the ocean. This is the only way we can make a difference"
Tiny amounts of expensive foods aren't gonna make a dent in the status quo. Keeping things small means planning to fail.
"Yes, solar and wind farms are good, but only if we make very few of them, by local artisans. Wouldn't want dreaded industry to actually help save the planet."
But you can't just deride people for being concerned about industry since industry, or more generally, the immense energy requirements needed for (and wasted by) an (increasingly less) western lifestyle, is is the source of the problem in the first place. Now, such an amount of energy expenditure is not sustainable at a global scale. Of course we need newer/greener technologies to save us from ending up like the proverbial boiled frog but we also need to understand how we got into that place. Capitalism, whether good or bad it doesn't matter, has a logic to it and it has externalities. I find that people who pretend those externalities are a minor problem/don't exist are the ones who benefit the most from the actual status quo and who will staunchly defend against changing anything in their way of life. That's when you get lame attacks about wanting to live a cave because you say SUV are energetically absurd and should be taxed to oblivion.
When you make something at scale, when you change scale you have well, scale issues. What happen when all your soil can't pump out the water ? What happens where there is no space available for pollinating insects ? Suburbia is an attempt to scale housing after all. Not great imho.
Another problem we have thing is that solar and wind energy production don't just fall into your hands, there's a lot of fossil fuel baked in their making. Are we sure that the energy harvested by a solar panel over its lifetime recoup what it has needed for production ? Maybe, I have no idea. (If someone know and can chime in, I'd be interested) So you don't just get to just go big brrrr and forget
That was my point. Thanks for reading.
The point is that seaweed is actually less intensive than other forms of agriculture, though, so replacing other industrial agriculture with seaweed agriculture is a net decrease in intensity.
It's similar to EV's: you still need to damage the environment to produce and operate them, but they cause less damage than ICE vehicles, so substitution is a net win.
Another comparison would be when people complain about building tall apartment/condo towers "hurting the environment". Sure, it probably does hurt compared to doing nothing, but the alternative isn't nothing, it's lower density sprawl that hurts nature far more. This is why being opposed to urban density is a fundamentally anti-environmental position.
Same deal for seaweed scaling. If you're opposed to scaling up the thing that hurts the environment less, then you're in favor of hurting the environment.
Another component is that it could strengthen ties between local communities, particularly between local agriculture and aquaculture. Those doing the kelp farming would probably have a few contacts with farmers interested in using kelp for animal feed, such as for the methane reduction proposal, and building a tie. They might also have other aquaculture employment, like clearing algal blooms, which could then be sold as fertaliser. I personally prefer that scene to something that's been financially instrumentised to death, has no local component, and is going to be lobbying to have the rules made its way instead of fitting in with pre-existing kelp exploitation by those with folio rights.
This is business, not charity. Suitable locations in the coast that aren't occupied yet by other sectors and are affordable are more rare than a silver unicorn and they are vanishing by climate change. This are cold climate species and like 90% of the seaweed forests in N Spain vanished in 20 years by warmer water for example.
Manipulating the offer and keeping it low is how you can sell your product at a high price and recover the investment plus a benefit. Is done by everybody and their grandma since thousands of years so, maybe is not so stupid.
There are Chinese type traditional seaweed production based in brown algae, and Japanese type seaweed production based in red algae. They aren't the same products and don't taste the same. Both coexist by targeting different customers. In fact a part of the Palmaria "Chinese" seaweed is cultured to feed crabs, that are the real product
If something goes wrong with mass scale seaweed farming how bad things can become?I don't know, producing toxins, being invasive and spreading spores to all the oceans, being affected by virus and spreading those virus, depleting oxygen/sunlight in some big areas or dying by some disease and becoming source of methane, to name a few from my point of not knowing about the topic.
The impact of something going wrong on land usually doesn't spread very far, but what about all interconnected seawater?
Ice-9 made me afraid of that kind of things.
farm planning/ disease propagules we've learned quite a bit about because of salmon farming.
Etc.
What is fucked regarding seaweed massive dieoffs due to climate change and tropicalisation of temperate ecosystems, disappearance of kelp forests, for example along thousands of km of southeastern Australian coastline.
Monocultures in plants are something entirely different from pooping, pissing fish that shed tons of parasites and get showered in food and antiparasitics. We'll have to see what the problems will actually be.
I used to love those snacks