Do People Eat Seaweed? Yes, much food contains seaweed products. The sea’s best weeds often show up in frozen foods, cakes, pies and brand – name toppings like hot fudge and salad dressing.
Look for agar, carrageenan, and alginates on the labels of your favorite foods. You’ll find carrageenan in the recipe for most ice cream sold in America. Carrageenan comes from a kind of seaweed often called Irish moss.
Seaweeds are used extensively as food in coastal cuisines around the world. Seaweed has been a part of diets in China, Japan, and Korea since prehistoric times.
Seaweed is also consumed in many traditional European societies, in Iceland and western Norway, the Atlantic coast of France, northern and western Ireland, Wales and some coastal parts of South West England, as well as Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
On the island of Fiji people eat crunchy seaweed mixed with fermented coconut milk. East West Canadians eat seaweed snacks instead of potato chips. In fact, almost everybody who lives by the sea eat’s ocean vegetables, and these underwater treats find their way on to more inland tables every day.
Even scientists enjoy working on them as experiments have shown that a slimy relative of seaweed could serve as food in outer space. The plants would grow on space explorer’s waste products, providing food and oxygen in return. So now we know that people eat seaweed.
Does seaweed count as a vegetable? Seaweed and marine algae have more concentrated nutrition than vegetables grown on land and they have long been considered to possess powers to prolong life, prevent disease, and impart beauty and health. For thousands of years, this mineral-rich vegetable has been a staple in Asian diets.
Content for this question contributed by Amy Mescher, resident of Manning, Carroll County, Iowa, USA
