Seaweed Sunday - Get foraging!
Every Sunday we are going to bring you some interesting facts and uses for our favourite living marine treasure, seaweed.
Seaweed for the climate
You may have heard us say it a few times, but we really believe seaweed has the power to help solve the climate crisis. Wether we choose to eat it and use it as a carbon positive alternative to meat, create biodegradable plastic from it, make surfboards from it... I could go on. But please tune in every Sunday, as we will let you know a short interesting fact all about seaweed, that you probably didn't know about.
To start us off this week. A simple one but one that not many folk realise.
Did you know all seaweed found within UK waters is edible?
Being an island nation with most places within easy reach of a beach, we live in a seaweed foragers, dream!
Do's and don'ts
It's important to note a few things though, you should never eat the dead washed up seaweed that ends up on the beach or shoreline. This could be collected, dried and used for fuel for example or even your very own bio plastic (more on that one soon) or left as it actually acts as a carbon sink. You need to only ever collect seaweed that is alive. So seaweed which you can see with a root, usually still attached to a rock. You should never rip the seaweed off (from the roots) and always just snip the top of the seaweed that you want to eat, just treat it like any living plant or vegetable that can keep yielding.
There are literally 100s of edible species
The best seaweeds for foraging are actually the ones generally found within the UK, which also can be found in abundance. The species which are most common and best to eat are; Dulse, Laver, Kelp, Sea Lettuce, Carrageen...
Learn more
If you want to learn more we recommend checking out Sea Spoon as they offer courses in how and what to forage.
See their blog here;