seaweed

Graham made a pretty bold decision to go organic a few years back after attending a lecture by Dr. Arden Anderson, an American proponent of organic principles. There aren’t a lot of organic farms in the far south, and Graham’s story is unusual in other ways – when an injury he’d been unsuccessfully trying to treat through conventional medicine for 14 years was healed in a few visits to an alternative health provider, he began questioning some of his practices, including his use of chemicals on the farm. Ever since then, he’s been reading all the organic farming, nutrition and alternative medicine materials he can get his hands on and attending lectures and conferences, and he found out about a presentation on seaweed from one of the mailing lists he’s on.

Miva was already planning on going to the presentation in Dunedin, and I decided to tag along for the day. After a morning swim and another visit to Blaze to deliver some blenderized food, we headed east.

The aquarium was not in the middle of the city as we’d expected, instead it was 18km down along a windy peninsula. The aquarium itself was less than impressive, but the program was a lot of fun. We got to taste about 10 different kinds of fresh seaweeds…served from the touch tanks, which was a little weird since they were floating in amongst starfish, crabs and anemones. Then we went back upstairs and grazed from three big tables full of food made with seaweed – everything from a sea lettuce and lentil salsa to popcorn with chili wakame seasoning, kelp chips and sea grapes on crackers with cream cheese. Some of the stuff tasted a little too much like the smell of low tide, but some of it was really good.