Seaweed farming: will the students become the masters?

February 2019

For some this is breaking all the universally accepted conventions in food and drink but for many it is really ‘old news’ that the Japanese malt whisky competes and often beats both Scotch and Irish whiskies.

Japanese whisky is traditionally produced just like any malt, distilled from yeast, water and malted barley at a distillery owned most probably by the Nikka or the Suntory brand before a maturation of at least three years (and a day) in oak casks. A 21-year-old Suntory Hibiki 75cl bottle retails in the area of £500, having topped the blended whisky category four times at the prestigious World Whiskey Awards, and having scored 96 out of 100 in the 2014 Jim Murray’s influential Whiskey Bible.

Similarly, the 18-year-old Suntory Yamazaki, described as 'legendary' by whisky experts at Master of Malt (and retailing at £455 per bottle), has won gold at the 2007 World Spirits Challenge and double gold at the 2005 San Francisco World Spirits Championship.

Famous Japanese Whiskies

Surprisingly, the Celtic answer to this Japanese challenge of centuries of Celtic dominion in this field is excellence in the farming and harvesting of a food ingredient primarily recognised as Japanese: seaweed. Seaweed that in the Western mindset is mainly linked with Japanese sushi and ramen, is now increasingly perceived as a sustainable alternative source for protein and minerals and an ingredient gaining access to many households.

The quality of production, packaging and exporting of Irish and Scottish seaweed types such as nori, kombu and wakame starts reaching and exceeding the quality of the Japanese equivalents.

Seaweed is not new to the Irish palate. The red seaweed chondrus crispus, commonly called carrageen or Irish moss is a basic ingredient for the thickening of milk in the traditional Irish dessert ‘Carrageen Pudding’. Palmaria palmata, also called dulse, dillisk or dilsk has been in the past a popular savoury snack sold in paper bags and it is still sold in some traditional grocer shops or as flavouring in cooking and baking. Abernethy’s ‘Dulse and Sea Salt Butter’ is a popular luxury hand-paddled country butter roll that has won numerous awards.

Irish and Scottish seaweeds are rich in soluble fibre which is specifically good for feeling full and also helps to lower bad LDL cholesterol. They contain lots of antioxidants which are very good for mopping up free radicals and, of course, they are a good source of omega 3 and B12. A less well-known seaweed growing off the Irish coastline is alaria, a mild algae variety containing three times more magnesium than that much promoted as 'superfood' kale.

But also in Scotland, quite a few nutrient-rich varieties including dulse, kombe, sea lettuce and sugar kelp are harvested and processed for the ‘healthy’ sector of the food market as well as for cosmetics and even gin. On the Western Isles, sugar kelp is gathered by hand for making Isle of Harris Gin.

Similarly, Shetland Distillery Company uses bladderwrack seaweed harvested from the Shetland coastline for making one of its gins whereas the Hebridean Seaweed Company on Lewis harvests and processes seaweed for use in skincare and other products.

Kelp: not far from tagliatelle or even bacon?

A large number of the Celtic production is exported in Europe, namely the Netherlands and Germany where food and other manufacturers use it as basis for the production of a range of products such as gluten-free, low carb tagliatelle-style pasta (himanthalia, sea-spaghetti) to seaweed bacon, seaweed-based burgers and sausages.

As with any new commercial sector, seaweed farming and harvesting has its own challenges. Some environmentalists claim that uncontrolled harvesting, especially the mechanical dredging of kelp forests, may damage the marine environment, deplete fish stocks, increase coastal erosion and drive climate change and parallel such activities to clear-felling virgin rainforests.

As a result, the Scottish government very recently announced a review of the already robust regulations around the harvesting of kelp in Scottish water and imposed further restrictions, putting a halt in plans for a more industrial approach in the seaweed sector. However, government would 'keep the situation under review' so that future forms of sustainable harvesting might be permitted.

Seaweed farm field in South-East Asia

Regardless of the initial hurdles, the genie is out of the bottle: seaweed is a growth industry also for the Western markets and it will expand rapidly in the next few years. However, this growth will not be achieved wild harvests but with aquaculture and cultivated seaweeds like in China, Japan and Southeast Asia where the production scale is massive, with millions of tons of annual production. 

It will not be a surprise if, a decade from now, we see seaweed farmers moving from at-sea cultivation to land-based operations with recirculating aquaculture systems and seaweed cultivation being incorporated in Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA) programmes together with farmed fish as another sustainable food source.

Professor Alexandros Paraskevas, Academic Lead