Super SEAWEED!
From a sustainable food to biofuel, there’s so much more to this underrated plant than people realise…
Consumer affairs director Emilie Martin is on a mission to help you make greener decisions at home and when you shop
If seaweed to you is just something that gets tangled around your ankles when you take a dip in the sea, think again. This plant could play a key role in helping us lead more sustainable lives, and it even helps improve the health of our seas as it grows. Here are four things you probably didn’t know about seaweed…
1 IT’S GOOD FOR US AND THE PLANET
We all know that eating a more plant-based diet is one way to tackle climate change, but eating a wider range of plants instead of relying on an intensively farmed handful is also more eco-friendly – and seaweed could be one of them. When you think about seaweed-based foods, nori, which is used to wrap sushi rolls, or laverbread, a traditional part of Welsh cuisine, may come to mind.
Seaweeds such as laver and wakame have been identified by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) as ‘future foods’ – crops with a high nutritional content (seaweed contains antioxidants including vitamins A, C and E), which can be farmed with relatively low environmental impact.
‘The chances are, you’ve already eaten seaweed, as it’s used to make the setting agent agar-agar, which is used widely in a range of processed foods,’ says Good Housekeeping cookery editor Emma Franklin. ‘To cook with seaweed, simmer dried kombu in broths and soups for a lovely umami flavour boost, top poke bowls or salads with shredded sheets of nori, or toss strips of rehydrated wakame in dressing and serve as a side dish.’ As it’s so rich in iodine, though, the British Dietetic Association recommends eating seaweed no more than once a week.
2 IT CAN BE FARMED IN AN ECO-FRIENDLY WAY
‘You don’t need any pesticides, fertiliser or fresh water to grow seaweed. We just plant it and it does its thing – so it’s true zero-input farming,’ explains Ella Sturley from Câr-y-môr, a three-hectare communityowned seaweed and shellfish farm located off the Pembrokeshire coast. Some types of seaweed grow quickly, which means they can regularly be harvested when farmed, a bit like ‘cut-and-come-again’ lettuce. The rope-grown sugar kelp grown at Câr-y-môr, among which other species self-seed, grows up to 1m per month. ‘We don’t strip the line completely when we harvest the seaweed, so there’s always some there to support the marine life that’s grown up around it. Then it simply grows back,’ Ella explains. Câr-y-môr seaweed is farmed alongside mussels, scallops and oysters to make the area that is cultivated more productive, too.
3 SEAWEED BOOSTS SEA HEALTH
As well as supporting biodiversity along our coasts, seaweed also plays a role in removing pollution from the surrounding sea and helps regulate sea acidity, which increases when carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere and is absorbed by our oceans. However, while seaweed absorbs carbon as it grows, more research is needed to determine exactly how much of it can be stored away beyond the life of the plant in a way that helps to tackle climate change.
4 IT CAN BE USED FOR MORE THAN JUST FOOD
Most of the seaweed that’s harvested today is consumed as food or used in animal feed, but experts are exploring other uses in biofuels, bioplastics, as seaweed-based fertilisers and even as food supplements for cattle to reduce the amount of methane they produce.