A new concept of understanding the sea as a garden.

April 9, 2021 1:14 PM

A Spanish chef is cultivating a grain that needs neither irrigation nor fertilizer to grow: It comes from the sea.
posted by Leeway (28 comments total)

This is fascinating and Ángel León's entire career sounds interesting. I really respect the people in the restaurant industry that are passionate about foods in this way. The official website linked from the article has more info for people that are curious, including a comparative nutrient table .

I'm also wondering if (more like how many) there are any foraged or cultivated marine crops that have been lost to us through colonization. I know the Coast Salish foraged seaweeds. I wonder if any of First Nation's communities up and down the coasts of BC might have had something like a marine grain?

I wish I could order a bag of this stuff to taste.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 2:55 PM on April 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

And to think that's without the benefit of the millennia of selective breeding and hybridization that made the major cereal groups what they are.
posted by jedicus at 3:26 PM on April 9, 2021 [18 favorites]

this is pretty durn cool
posted by glonous keming at 3:40 PM on April 9, 2021

I have no idea how true it is but in Ryan North's How to Invent Everything he wrote that you can get from ancient wheat to a modern variety in 20 (wheat) generations. So depending on how long the grass takes to grow it might not be too long to develop even more productive varieties.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:47 PM on April 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Aquaculture is about to go crazy with stuff like this. Not necessarily like, "I'll have an eelgrass salad please" but replacing land crops for things like animal feed, certain flours etc. Think of a kelp field the size of a major commercial farm — remember, it's 50-100 feet deep! If I could invest in kelp futures I would.

Of course I'd like to think that, starting from a position of eco-consciousness as these folks seem to be, we will avoid the pitfalls of monocultures that have made barren soy and palm wastelands of enormous swathes of the planet... we'll see.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:02 PM on April 9, 2021 [7 favorites]

mind blown by followup reading about the differences between seaweed (multi-cellular algae) and seagrass (vascular plants with leaves, roots, stems)...i've eaten so many different types of seaweed in Japanese cuisine, really surprised that seagrass wasn't included in there somewhere.
posted by th3ph17 at 4:24 PM on April 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

I could stand to eat a lot more samphire if someone could work that out please.
posted by biffa at 4:56 PM on April 9, 2021 [6 favorites]

Haha you just have to look at fish farming or bottom-trawl mining to know that no, we’re not going to do any better environmentally at sea than we did on land.
posted by sixswitch at 5:11 PM on April 9, 2021 [18 favorites]

Eelgrass has a bunch of uses:

Eelgrass has been used for food by the Seri tribe of Native Americans on the coast of Sonora, Mexico. The rhizomes and leaf-bases of eelgrass were eaten fresh or dried into cakes for winter food. It was also used for smoking deer meat. The Seri language has many words related to eelgrass and eelgrass-harvesting. The month of April is called xnoois ihaat iizax, literally "the month when the eelgrass seed is mature".[2]

Zostera has also been used as packing material and as stuffing for mattresses and cushions.

On the Danish island of Læsø it has been used for thatching roofs. Roofs of eelgrass are said to be heavy, but also much longer-lasting and easier to thatch and maintain than roofs done with more conventional thatching material. More recently, the plant has been used in its dried form for insulation in eco-friendly houses and as a ground cover in permaculture gardens, once its salt layer washed off (ex: Friland, Danish eco-village).

In the United States, eelgrass insulation was commercially marketed in the early 1900's as Cabot's Quilt by the Samuel Cabot Co of Boston. However due to an outbreak of Labyrinthula zosterae which destroyed crops of eelgrass, combined with the collapse of the homebuilding industry due to the great depression, it went out of production and was replaced in new homes with fiberglass (introduced in the late 1930's).

Some studies show promise for eelgrass meadows to sequester atmospheric carbon to reduce anthropogenic climate change.

Zostera can also be utilized to produce biomass energy using the Jean Pain method.

It isn’t clear from the article whether the Seri ate the seed as well, but it might be interesting to to see whether there were some particularly palatable varieties hanging around where they were on the Sonoran coast. Odd that it’s native all over the place but not in South America except at one spot way down on the Southern tip.
posted by jamjam at 6:20 PM on April 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

Those kelp forests will need protection from tasty sea urchins. Someone will have to raise sea otters.
posted by The otter lady at 7:25 PM on April 9, 2021 [10 favorites]

Curious -- how exactly is it harvested? I didn't see it in the article but maybe I missed a paragraph.
posted by cnidaria at 9:16 PM on April 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

I don't remember seeing it in the article, either.
posted by aniola at 10:08 PM on April 9, 2021

Good to have you with us, The otter lady and cnidaria.
posted by lostburner at 10:45 PM on April 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

forbiddencabinet, the coast Salish cultivated clam gardens, some think long before any cultivation got underway in the Fertile Crescent.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 10:50 PM on April 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

Those kelp forests will need protection from tasty sea urchins. Someone will have to raise sea otters.
posted by The otter lady at 7:25 PM on April 9

You know it's a good idea when the special interest groups start jumping in so early.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:58 PM on April 9, 2021 [9 favorites]

I know a guy working on cultivating sugar kelp in the PNW too. Agree that it seems like in a decade we'll all be eating a lot more seaweed - this seems super trendy in food science right now.
posted by potrzebie at 11:40 PM on April 9, 2021

"Fish! And plankton! And sea greens and protein from the sea!"
posted by jscalzi at 6:20 AM on April 10, 2021 [9 favorites]

Golf clap, Scalzi. It's been awhile since I've thought about Logan's Run. I was honestly expecting someone to make a Soylent Blue reference first.
But yeah, to sixswitch's point above, this could represent another step toward environmental sustainability or a horrifying dystopia depending largely on the choices of the people who implement the technology. At least in León we have someone who seems to give a damn.
posted by Leeway at 10:27 AM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

As long as we don't all have to participate in Carousel I'm on board.
posted by 1adam12 at 10:33 AM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

"Don't trust anyone over 30."
"Easy if there isn't anyone alive over 30."
posted by doctornemo at 12:35 PM on April 10, 2021

Re: TFA, what a cool innovation.

I'm very glad to read that it's gluten free.
posted by doctornemo at 12:35 PM on April 10, 2021

Yeah, kelp cultivation is fairly mature compared to this cutting-edge stuff. Asia does massive-scale kelp cultivation, and the US/Canada/Mexico have been getting into boutique kelp cultivation on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides. There are pretty large regulatory hurdles in Puget Sound so we only have one local kelp farm (as part of an existing multi-generational shellfish farm), but there are cool projects in Alaska especially.

But kelp you grow on ropes, suspended between anchors and buoys. Makes it easy to nondestructively pull it up and harvest it. I have no idea how you'd harvest a sea grass growing in the actual ocean substrate (sand or muck or whatever) at any sort of scale without massive habitat damage along the way. But I would be happy to be proven wrong by some clever person.
posted by cnidaria at 5:15 PM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

Er, grains from a sea grass. But my question stands.
posted by cnidaria at 5:16 PM on April 10, 2021

Also, to make a boutique (aka non-massive-scale, diversified, etc) kelp and shellfish farm economically viable in the current politico-economic environment, you usually have to get into some kind of value-added product like Vegan Kelp Caviar or Pickled Alaskan Bull Kelp or something. Not that it isn't awesome and super ecologically exciting, but it still runs into the same economies of scale issues that small diversified organic vegetable/etc. farms run into.
posted by cnidaria at 5:19 PM on April 10, 2021

I would like to believe that ethically trained sea otters perform the harvesting and get scritches.
posted by away for regrooving at 5:50 PM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

As long as we don't all have to participate in Carousel I'm on board.

When you walk through a storm hold your head up high...
posted by hippybear at 6:17 PM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

away for regrooving, I wonder if the sea otters would end up being the truffle dogs of the sea, or the truffle pigs of the sea? The problem with the pig, you see, is it *also* want to eat the truffle!

Dogs, on the other hand, would prefer to make you happy by finding the truffles, and then call in their reward in the form of some nice dog treats and extra scritches. :-)
posted by cnidaria at 6:27 PM on April 10, 2021

(I assume otters would be like truffle dogs. They seem much more interested in ingesting bivalves and tasty urchins than sea grass nuggets.)
posted by cnidaria at 6:27 PM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]