USES OF SEAWEEDS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 58, 9 March 1935, Page 6 (Supplement)

USES OF SEAWEEDS.

By L. M. CRANWELL, M.A., Botanist, Auckland Museum.

TN Hawaii, if we went a marketing, J[ we could buy flying fish for dinner, and with each bundle we would be given a sprig of fragrant seaweed, just as parsley is given here. In Southern Wales the fishwives still cry their produce in the streets, and on certain clays laver bread, sprinkled with oatmeal, is for sale. Laver, prepared from a seaweed as thin and tough as oil-silk, is usually eaten with bacon or roast mutton, but, like so many of the red seaweeds, it may be served in milk. A closely related species is grown in Japan, mainly for sale in China. One day I went into a shop in Grey Avenue, looking for this delicacy, but it was no longer obtainable. All good Chinamen, they said solemnly,

were boycotting Japanese goods; but they could offer coarse, yard-long stripe of brown weed from Shanghai, wee dried mushrooms, and even the sparkling birds' nest soup material from the vaulted caves of Sarawak. These dishes seem quaint to us, but the fact remains that seaweed at least is eaten along every coastline in the world. The Hawaiians, for instance, kept their splendid physique over centuries of isolation without milk, grain or ordinary meat, but simply with a diet of tafo, fish (when obtainable) and seaweed, or limu, as they called it.

I do not claim that it is a great food. Like lettuce, it is regarded more as a relish, and, of course, it has considerable medicinal value. As I said before, the coastal Maoris were

free from goitre, while inland the great "tonga," like a bird's crop, disfigured many "women. A few years ago I saw a young girl near RuataInina so cruelly afflicted that she could barely gasp out a few words. Such oases, one hopes, are treated with iodine, once obtained solely from seaweeds. Nowadays most of the world's supply is derived from the Chilian saltpetre deposits. Japan is again the exception. She ignores the Chilian monopoly and thriftily prepares all the iodine she needs from her own brown seaweeds.

It is useless to try to eat any and every seaweed. Some are nauseating, and only a small proportion is' really rich in iodine. These are the laminarians, one of which I figured last week. With some the scent, keen and fresh, can be detected before you reach the tide at all.

Before seaweeds became eo important as a source of iodine, they were used chiefly as potash fertilisers on the coasts of France and the British Isles. On the bleak ice-swept shores of Scandinavia they helped to form enough soil to grow a few handfula of grain. Seaweeds rot quickly, keeping the soil moist; they are free from weed seeds (they wouldn't spread ragwort!), and they nre rapid in their action. They were applied in great loads (25 to 30 tons to the aero) to crops of early potatoes,, mangels, lucerne and various crucifers. Of course, the cost "of cartage prohibited their being taken far from the sea.

By ISOO seaweeds were being exploited for the commercial production of potash and sodium carbonate (for soap-making), and soon the law had to step in to protect the farmers on some shores. All this meant wealth to the Western Isles of Scotland, where yearly about 20,000 tons of* kelp ash were sold at from £10 to £20 per ton. With the repeal of duties on salt and barilla (obtained from a samphire or glaeswort (Salicornia, in Spain), the soap-makers deserted, leaving landowner and peasant to suffer alike. After a lull kelp was again burnt, this time as the only commercial source of iixline, but prices fell heavily wllcii the potassium deposits in Stassfurt were opened. However, the industry went on from 1841 to 1875, when the Chilian deposits captured the markets. This was the real death blow.

A bald recital such as thie does not give more than a hint of what seaweeds have meant in the lives of the proud people of these wild, coasts. It was my friend, the late Rev. Angus Macdonald, telling me of life in Stornoway, that made me see the picture as a fight for prosperity always challenged by discoveries in the outer world. He showed me more, that a man might live half a world away, yet his thoughts, would ever be roving back to his childhood, and that he would die with the taste of the sea tangles still sweet on his lips.