veg again

Harvesting seaweed must be handled carefully and transported with environmentally friendly non-motorized fishing boats.

The terms "seaweeds" and "sea vegetables" are used interchangeably herein and refer to the large, visible macroalgae growing attached to each other, rocks, and the seafloor in the intertidal zone and shallow seawater. Microalgae, phytoplankton, cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) and eel grasses are not included. The term "sea herbs" is not used and not recommended since it compromises the true cryptogamic identity and phylogenetic classification of the macroalgae, even though it is used affectionately by herbalists. The term "seaweed" is a bit misleading: with a few notable exceptions, seaweeds are actually saltwater-tolerant, land-dependent plants growing almost exclusively at the narrow interface where land and sea meet. Most must be firmly attached to something to stay in the "photic zone", where they can receive sufficient sunlight.

All seaweeds are photosynthetic. The best-known truly "pelagic" seaweed (pelagic means living and growing at sea, independent of land) is Sargasso weed, a prolific brown seaweed of the genus Sargassum. This lush plant covers an area of 7000 square miles near the Bermuda Triangle, with a floating layer 1-2 feet thick; modest wave action sorts it out into long even rows that resemble a carefully-planted field on land. After several days of slowly chugging through the Sargasso Sea while taking transatlantic transect vertical plankton tows, I experienced a common visual hallucination and urge to jump off the boat and walk around on the Sargasso weed as had many mariners before me. The urge was compelling. I nearly had to be restrained.

Sea vegetables have been consumed regularly by all coastal peoples since the first days.

Seaweeds are best used as regular components of a wise diet. Sea vegetables have been consumed regularly by all coastal peoples since the first days. Special harvesting, processing, storage, and eating rituals evolved to meet local needs. The ease of drying sea vegetables in full sunlight, and, their innate long-term stability when kept completely dry permits safe long-term storage and facilitates both personal and commercial transport, And, an almost indefinite shelf-life when stored completely dry and away from light.

Worldwide post-industrial healthy living consciousness has in the most recent score of years initiated a very deliberate increase in overt human dietary seaweed consumption, especially in the more-developed postindustrial nations where voluntary vegetarian and macrobiotic diets are increasingly popular. Most east Asian populations (Japan, Korea, china) continue to eat large amounts of seaweed per capita. Japan has the highest per capita dietary

Japan has the highest per capita dietary sea vegetable consumption (and, correspondingly, the highest per capita dietary iodine consumption, and, an extremely low incidence of breast cancer).

sea vegetable consumption (and, correspondingly, the highest per capita dietary iodine consumption, and, an extremely low incidence of breast cancer). In the most developed countries, covert sea vegetable product consumption by the average person probably far exceeds overt consumption. This results from the widespread use of several phycocolloids as food additives for both bulking foods with cheap water (carageenan from the red algae Chondrus crispus, Irish moss, and Gigartina spp., grapestone) where the clathritic capacity of the phycocolloid to control large amounts of water in a semisolid gel makes for an even texture and distribution of favor and clobbering, as in cheap frozen semi-dairy confections; and, for stabilizing semisolid structure, as in ice cream, where about one pound of the brown seaweed extract algin is used to stabilize a ton of ice cream.