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ou are watching someone open a jar of seaweed salad on Zoom, popping the lid and scooping out a forkful of the vaguely pickle-colored mix. You might be slightly hungry yourself, so this is not an ideal situation, like watching cooking shows on an empty stomach. The demonstration is part of a panel on “Seaweed Solutions” (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 2022). The host notes that 2,200 people have registered—a fairly significant fan base that sets expectations high for those curious of what problems seaweed will solve. Someone asks how it tastes. “Crunchy,” the demonstrator replies, through a mouthful, “more crunchy than the green stuff you get at sushi restaurants.” So how can people help climate change? “Buy more seaweed products. They’re already out there on the market!” As your stomach gurgles, what do you feel?  

I write this experience in the second-person voice to help you reflect on the feeling of being interpolated as a consumer, where your sense of participation and belonging comes from flexing your credit card at the supermarket. Voting with your wallet to purchase a new product has become so naturalized in American capitalism that it can mask other things that we are actually hungry for—the personal relationships that are mediated through food. Food is a “medium of contact” (Paxson, 2023: 7) that nourishes relationships and acts of care (Abbots, Lavis, and Attala 2015). I take the lonely jar of seaweed salad as an occasion to reflect on the UN Ocean Decade, a key campaign around future oceans which demands the “science we need for the ocean we want.” Through following the seaweed, I ask: how might your fork, your chopsticks, your plate, your gurgling stomach enable a critical insight into the scalar challenges of aquaculture and capitalism, wrought through deep time? What lessons might seaweed have for the UN Ocean Decade?

Seaweed is already in our foods

What continues to surprise me about the marketing of American seaweed aquaculture is how persistently it avoids long-standing cultural traditions of eating seaweed. Instead, it dwells in novelty and recency: expressions like “kelp is the new kale!” frame seaweed as an innovative discovery, rather than as a food with deep culinary roots all over the world. Seaweed is an ancient resource. It not only forms the backbone of many cultural eating practices, but has also been hypothesized as a driver of human migration from Asia to the Americas via a “kelp highway” along the coast, as a convenient source of food and nutrients (Erlandsen et al., 2007). In the British Isles one might have grown up spreading laver on toast; in northern France, mixing seaweed into butter for a savory spread; in Japan, enjoying seaweed in many forms including miso soup; in Hawaii, freshly mixed into poke. Seaweed cookbooks are spaces of culinary fusion, from Asian-fusion recipes in the Hawaiian cookbook The Limu Eater (1975) to avocado toast with seaweed flakes in Ocean Greens (2016). However, rarely do American seaweed aquaculture conversations encourage audiences to eat more Korean food, or frequent more Japanese restaurants—the focus is strongly nationalistic, on consuming domestic seaweed and integrating it into American cuisine (presumably burgers or pasta), and to start doing it in ways that don’t call attention to the presence of seaweed.

I call this tendency “invisible seaweed”—a tendency to hide the presence of seaweed in foodstuffs and commodities. Invisible seaweed is at the heart of a contradiction in the marketing of American aquaculture: eat more seaweed! But also: seaweed is already in so many things that you eat! For example, seaweed extracts are a stabilizer for beer foam, a common ingredient in ice cream and toothpaste, and an additive to many beauty products (Mouritsen, 2013). In the logic of invisible seaweed, seaweeds are always already in American foods and products, but never in the American consciousness – even though such an observation might not apply equally well to ethnic minorities whose cuisines already use seaweed. Used as a hidden substance in foodstuffs, seaweed may have nutritional benefits, but has no potential to evoke any of the deep-time memories that other cultural practices of eating and using seaweeds suggest. Invisible seaweed participates in the kind of nutritional reductionism that inhibits more intimate and intergenerational relations of care with our coastal seaweeds.  

When seaweed is the backbone of community 

To really understand what is at stake between “buy more seaweed!” and other ways to interpolate an audience, consider limu kala—what might be called the “forgiveness seaweed”—a seaweed whose poetic story I would like to amplify. During a recent conversation I joined with members of KUA, a Hawaii-based initiative that supports creative and community-based solutions for environmental problems, we began talking about ho‘oponopono, a reconciliation ceremony traditionally used to mediate within and between families. As part of this process of conflict resolution, a piece of fresh limu kala (limu meaning seaweed) could be eaten by both parties; or it might be braided into a lei to place around the neck, or a haku lei for the head. Then you would walk straight into the ocean, until the limu kala lei literally floats off and is carried away by the currents. To have the weight of the unforgivable literally float away is a beautiful visual metaphor. Who do you need to forgive, and what do you need to let go of? What do you feel when you imagine the buoyancy of limu kala, a form that inspires forgiveness? 

Ho‘oponopono expands the ways that we might think of environmental remediation to include human social well-being as part of and mediated through the ʻāina—the Land, inclusive of waters and sky. This is a key shift. Consider how environmental remediation is normally thought of as a top-down strategy, absent of people—restoring a wetland, cleaning up an oil spill (Chang, 2015). The work that KUA and one of its networks (E Alu Pū) are doing is much more reflexive: seaweeds bring people together in community, and people work to promote seaweed abundance, such as protecting freshwater pathways to the ocean that are vital to the flourishing of green limu (seaweeds), among others. Tellingly, KUA takes its name from the word for “backbone,” and it is this way that they see limu as part of the material and figurative backbone of community. Limu and people are braided together, mediating each other’s flourishing. Ho‘oponopono is one example of how seaweeds, in particular cultural contexts, can be more than a resource in a capitalist system—they can be part of a repertoire for affects, or feelings—even as ho‘oponopono, as a popularized verb, makes its way into business contexts as a tool for conflict resolution. 

When seaweed innovation leaves capitalism intact

Invisible seaweed has contributions to make towards climate mitigation, but it also allows business as usual to continue. All three winners of the 2022 Ocean Innovation Prize of 1 million dollars – a prize designed to advance the goals of the Ocean Decade – were seaweed-focused: Biopac (seaweed-based bioplastics), SMO Solar Process (carbon capture from sargassum), and Symbrosia (seaweed feed supplements for livestock to reduce methane emissions) (Blue Climate Initiative, 2022). These companies have pitched some of the most actionable ways that seaweeds can reduce carbon emissions, but in ways that are articulable with global capitalism. For example, designing a seaweed additive to cattle feed may reduce methane emissions, but it doesn’t change other destructive elements of large-scale cattle farming in places like Brazil, including deforestation and Indigenous displacement. Many of the seaweed projects funded by the ARPA-E MARINER (Macroalgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Resources) project also seek to scale seaweed farming to this kind of level to produce biofuels: 

“the current state of macroalgae ‘mariculture’ is not capable of achieving the scale, efficiency and production cost necessary to support a seaweed-to-fuels industry. Achieving such productivity increases will require a technology-driven approach focusing on innovative engineering and systems-level solutions and the technologies needed to support them.” (ARPA-E, 2017)

Yet scale is the trickiest question. It is often a threshold where climate action is seen to matter (can it scale?), but also the point at which we are able to lose sight of how specific relationships with our environment spiritually and emotionally sustain us as human beings. Invisible seaweed may help balance the mathematical carbon budget—and this is urgent—but may also risk further abstracting seaweed from place, and people from place, and replicating some of the other ecological damages that are a product of capitalist systems. By contrast, smaller-scale community-based restoration movements like KUA can still have ripple effects, by cascading into other benefits. As Candace Fujikane writes, “Restoration projects show us that restorative events have outwardly cascading effects on ecological systems that are contingent on one another […] Mapping abundance offers us a way to rethink the scalar privileging of global corporate and state solutions over localized restoration movements” (Fujikane, 2021: 7). This does not mean that one has to live on the coast and forage for seaweeds—feelings of care and environmental concern can absolutely occur over distances (Heise, 2008)—but that one can still learn from the situation of seaweeds not to devalue local-scale actions and efforts. 

Remembering seaweeds, relating joyfully to place

Here I want to think with poet, artist, and Black Studies scholar Ashon Crawley (2022), who made the key observation that community gardening efforts in Black communities are often articulated as “providing resources” as the solution to economic scarcity—a mode of pathologizing people—when they could instead be encouraged as a way of cultivating multisensory joy. There is a similar lesson to be absorbed in seaweed aquaculture: it is one thing to eat healthy and support climate cuisine like the Atlantic Farms jar of seaweed salad if you can afford it, but what is left out of the picture is the emotional, spiritual, and community nourishment that is possible and sustained by food. My questions for aquacultural projects supported by the UN Ocean Decade are: what would it mean to live well and joyfully with seaweeds, nearshore or at a distance, and not forget or hide the ways that seaweeds are attached to place, are of a place? In addition to the health of coastlines, what other relationships might seaweeds remediate?   

References 

Abbots E, Lavis L, and Attala, L, eds. (2015) Careful Eating: Bodies, Food and Care. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

ARPA-E (2017) Macroalgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Resources. Available here. 

Blue Climate Initiative (2022) Winners of the Ocean Innovation Prize. Available here. 

Chang A (2015) Environmental remediation. Electronic Book Review, available here. 

Crawley A (2022) Sun, Soil, Salt, Water. Ocean Memory Sense and Sensing Conference (unpublished).

Erlandsen J et al. (2007) The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas. Island and Coastal Archaeology 2(2): 161-174.  

Heise U (2008) Sense of Place, Sense of Planet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Fujikane C (2021) Mapping Abundance: Kanaka Maoi and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i. Durham: Duke University Press.

KUA (2014) About KUA. Available here. 

Mouritsen O (2013) Seaweed: Edible, Available, & Sustainable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Paxson H, ed. (2023) Eating Beside Ourselves: Thresholds of Foods and Bodies. Durham: Duke University Press.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (2022) Seaweed Solutions. Available here. 

Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke Press, 2020) and co-editor of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke Press, 2021).

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