EAT Magazine July-August 2016_Victoria_48_Layout 1 7/18/16 11:32 AM Page 24
g EAT LOCAL
Seaweed Season BY CINDA CHAVICH SEA VEGETABLES ARE AMONG THE MOST NUTRITIOUS PLANTS ON EARTH—and we are literally swimming in the stuff. Go out to almost any island beach at low tide and you’ll see electric green sea lettuce and dark purple laver clinging to the rocks, fronds of frilly brown alaria (a.k.a. wakame), and salty sea asparagus at the high water line. Vast forests of kelp shelter small fish and other ocean life just offshore, and their wide flat blades and bulbous floats are often found washed up on the sand after a storm. For the uninitiated, it can all seem like little more than a tangle of salty flotsam to navigate around on your beach walk. But for experts like marine biologist Amanda Swinimer, it’s a tasty and healthy harvest. “We have 650 species of seaweed on our coasts,” she says, “and 32 types of kelp, the most diversity on the planet.” AN OCTOPUS’S GARDEN “This is rockweed, the dandelion of the sea,” says Swinimer, clipping off the forked sacs from the mats of leafy seaweed (also called bladderwrack) in the intertidal zone where we’re standing. “It’s prolific and loaded with sodium alginate, a substance that draws toxins and heavy metals from the body.” It’s also delicious, she says, simply sautéed with a little ginger and tamari, just until the pouches turn from khaki brown to bright green. We’ve come to the rocky end of Muir Creek Beach near Sooke, one of the spots where Swinimer forages for a variety of wild sea vegetables for her line of Dakini Tidal Wilds products that you’ll find at local groceries and health food stores. Bags of handharvested and dried winged kelp (wild wakame), sea kelp, laminaria (kombu), and kelp mixed with citrusy spruce tips and wild mint in her Land and Sea Tea are all foraged in the cold, clean waters north of Sooke. Swinimer also offers educational seaweed workshops and guided snorkel tours through the magical Pacific Northwest Kelp Forest— a way to observe the undulating “tidal dance of massive kelps and myriad creatures that make this underwater jungle their home. “They are the forests of the ocean,” she says, “home to thousands of fish and crab. I even saw a couple of octopus last season.” An estimated 650,000 tonnes of wild kelp grow along the province’s coast, with bull kelp being the fastest-growing seaweed on earth, growing from a tiny spore to a 61-metre plant in a single summer. SEAWEED TRADITIONS Various cultures have traditionally consumed seaweed—in China and Japan, Iceland and Norway, Ireland, Wales and Nova Scotia. While creative west coast chefs have been incorporating seaweed into their cooking for some time, most Canadians aren’t really
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EAT MAGAZINE JULY | AUGUST 2016