Makes a lot of sense. It's packed with vitamins and minerals, is presumably a decent way to get salt, and is captive/passive/non-attacking prey!
For Bay Area people, there are companies that teach seaweed foraging: what types to look for, where to look, healthy versus "on the toilet all day", etc. Always nice to have another excuse to go to the beach, especially at unusual hours (such as before dawn to catch a low tide).
The most important benefit might have been the high content of iodine, which is usually insufficient in terrestrial food. Obviously they did not have iodized salt, like us, to provide the required iodine.
They might have noticed that eating a little amount of seaweed will prevent illness.
For omega-3 fatty acids, they had much better food sources in bone marrow or in fish (the multicellular algae have very low content of fatty acids; those that are used for omega-3 fatty acid production are unicellular and they are not algae, even if they are named "algae" in advertisements and on labels, because it is believed that something like "straminipiles" would be incomprehensible for laymen; even many scientists misspell "straminipiles" as "stramenopiles", only "Straminipila" is correct Latin).
The vitamins were also abundant in their food, only iodine is deficient in all terrestrial food.
Which makes me think that seaweed was staple food at some time right? We wouldn't have evolved to need more iodine than we can get in our environment otherwise...
According to WHO estimates [1], a quarter of Africans have goiters so I think it's safe to say that archaic humans suffered from chronic iodine deficiency.
Evolution works through reproduction so any condition that doesn't impact survival until sexual maturity is unlikely to face any evolutionary pressure. Since humans are tribal and took care of their offspring in group settings, survivability after procreation also has little effect.
> any condition that doesn't impact survival until sexual maturity
Diseases that impact even just appearance can surely make you less attractive as a mate though. And larger goiters can impede breathing or swallowing. So I'd be suspicious of the idea that we've been significantly deficient in iodine for extended periods of our evolutionary history.
Goiter is usually not immediately lethal so for most of human history, people afflicted with it just kind of lived with it which likely meant there wasn't that much selective pressure against it. Consuming thyroid glands of terrestrial animals (usually ruminants) was an effective treatment of iodine dificiency before the modern nutritional sciences discovered the relationships between goiter and iodine deficiency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitre#History
Ruminants are more efficient at absorbing nutrients from plant material due their digestive system, and this is how they get iodine in non-coastal areas.
All vertebrates have thyroid glands and there is a very similar organ in marine chordates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endostyle. So this is an organ that likely emerged when our biological ancestors still lived in a iodine-rich environment.
> Obviously they did not have iodized salt, like us, to provide the required iodine.
Some places still (mostly) don’t. A notable exception (I’m sure there are others but not as well reported) is Israel where iodized salt isn’t a regulatory requirement and not very popular, with (predictable) widespread deficiencies:
I agree with you. I want to mention Sea salt has iodine very often and was a very common source for other kinds of salts besides sodium chloride. We started iodizing salt in response to electrical methods for extracting pure NaCl becoming popular.
Maybe it's a dumb question, but how do we know these biomarkers weren't from eating fish that are the seaweed?
If the biomarkers are able to remain detectable for thousands of years without breaking down, perhaps they're also able to accumulate in fish?
I don't know anything about it so my idea is probably wrong, but I'm surprised the article doesn't mention it since it seems like an obvious thing to wonder.
Several do, both fresh and salt water. Goldfish are a well-known plant-eating fish. You can’t keep them in aquaria with certain plants because they’ll nibble them relentlessly.
There are a few coastal fishes In Europe with a diet of mostly seaweed. They are very common but often discarded because their taste is awful and they don't preserve well. People that eats them assures first to remove most of the blood.
> They found the chemical biomarkers of seaweed and aquatic plants in 26 samples, which suggests that early humans were eating—or, at the very least, chewing—these bounties from the sea
Like, yeah maybe the fish they were eating was covered with seaweed, but unless they were popping the stomach/intestines into their mouth... for the parasite load(?), the seaweed in the fish is digested. This isn't Carbon-14 dating, they identified families of plants on the the ancient teeth, not digested plant matter.
There are plenty of compounds that aren't broken down by digestion. Salmon flesh is pink because of the astaxanthin in its natural diet, for example.
And the article doesn't make any mention of which specific biomarkers they chose or whether they're affected by digestion. They're obviously pretty hardy compounds to begin with if they're not broken down by saliva to begin with, or thousands of years of natural decay.
And it does seem kind of akin to carbon-14 dating. It's not like they found actual recognizable pieces of the plants in between their teeth or anything.
>Aquatic ecosystems are complex with some isotopic variability even within the same species of seaweed, freshwater algae, and freshwater aquatic plants (macrophytes), making use of this C&N isotopic data to detect these resources somewhat challenging, certainly where it represents <20% of the diet. Moreover, while stable isotopic analysis remains valuable in providing a broad view of major foods consumed, this is dependent on the dietary protein intake, with seaweeds lower in protein compared to meat or fish, and can therefore be overlooked due to equifinality, where other foods can, in combination, be used to explain the stable isotopic data observed, sometimes in contradiction to other archaeological evidence available.
Just watch survival shows like Alone or Life Below Zero, the fact that people ate things in their environment to survive, and that the things that didn't kill them and helped them survive were continued...is not news, it should actually be considered more an ongoing assumption that they did versus astonishment that they did. Nevertheless, aside from that slight rant, it is good to see scientific techniques and analysis used and those practices honed and more knowledge built about how humans have existed and lived.
We have a small specialty cut flower farm and also grow plants for fun. I like to take people around and just start eating all the herbs and leaves and berries and bits, off of all sorts of plants. "That's edible?" "How hungry are you?"
Yes...living off of just seaweeds seems...like a pretty bad idea and incomplete nutrition. In Alone participants are constrained to a specific plot of land -- I'll assume if Igor could go to other locations he could have augmented his diet and improved his living situation (not kept to that boggy area) like a good hunter-gatherer.
My understanding is that there are very few foods that are fine to live off of exclusively, especially vegetarian ones. Potatoes are the most famous example where it is possible, but even there it only works if you eat both white potatoes and sweet potatoes, which come from quite different plants from different taxonomic families.
From what I've understood from one particular (very early) experiment of living on just potatoes for a year is that it worked because (for some reason) the participants had, or developed, a particular gut microbiome which could transform some of the potato starch to additional nutrients which their bodies could then use.
> archaeologists had long assumed that the introduction of farming during the Neolithic era meant that early humans largely abandoned such foods from the sea
Always hard to tell if researchers are really as dull as these press releases make them to seem, or it's just academia's form of clickbait. Did anyone in their right mind really think that people went "ok, we've found a very labor intensive way to have food available for a relatively short period of a year, conditional on lots of factors like the weather, pests, disease, etc... time to put the kibosh on all other processes of generating caloric intake that we've honed for millennia!"
Most of the ethnicities we associate with Europeans are Indo-European in origin: pastoral, patriarchal nomads who swept down from the steppe in the distant past.
If the pre-Indo-Europeans disappeared quickly enough or were culturally overwhelmed, it makes sense that unfamiliar foods from the sea would be ignored by agriculture oriented steppe people.
This is really at least partially an answer. Clearly foraged foods lived on, but genetics has shown us that pre-agricultural, hunter gatherer Europeans were very genetically quite distinct from post-agricultural (and post Indo-European migration) populations, and we know that they were not Indo-European speakers, too. So it's also quite likely their cultures were lost and along with them at least some of the foods they ate.
Which is not to say that people living in these places didn't continue to eat seaweed, because they did.
You’re a bit mixed up here. A few millennia before the Indo-Europeans was the farming expansion out of Anatolia, and that already had a dramatic impact on the ethnic landscape in Europe. Moreover, the early steppe-oriented Indo-Europeans were not major practitioners of farming but pastoralists, and they only settled into farming once they merged with the settled agriculture communities that were already there in Europe.
But still, two radically different food producing paradigms meeting an established hunter-gatherer population could lead to some of the traditional foraged foods from the region being ignored.
I don’t know if seaweed is eaten or even prevalent in the seas around Anatolia, but steppe based cultures who drive herds would be likely to ignore it IMO
On top of that, the creation of agriculture was almost certainly extremely granular. There is a spectrum of foraging to farming. You go out in the forest and take some fruits back. Some of the discarded fruit seeds end up growing trees near your settlement. Someone eventually realizes that having fruit trees close by is really convenient, and they start planting seeds intentionally. This was probably done for a very, very long time without it being the dominant source of food.
It's actually not clear at all that this is the case in Western Europe. Agriculture came with sweeping genetic and archaeological changes. There's quite a bit of evidence for population replacement in large parts of Europe as agriculture moved in, rather than existing hunter gatherers adopting farming.
If you look at the more recent history of the agricultural settlement of other parts of the world, it's not too different. North America the most recent, but parts of Africa as well. Hunter gatherers have low population densities over often very large territories, and are sensitive to disruptions in animal migrations; but when they're able to forage and hunt reliably their diets are actually often much better than agricultural populations and involve less overall labour. So they don't necessarily just give it up because somehow agriculture is better.
... and even the proto-Indo-European pastoralists of the steppe continued to forage wild grains and plants (rather than plant wheat like their neighbours to the west) for almost a millennia after domesticating horses and cattle. David Anthony gets into this in "Horse, Wheel, Language". And it wasn't because they didn't know how, they just preferred not to. Settling down to plant crops has trade-offs. (I say this as a person with a pile of pre-winter garden chores I'm procrastinating...)
It's tricky to find it fresh, you usually only get it in small greengrocers or at the Auld Lammas fair. Used to be quite cheap for a bag. Very salty but quite edible and said to be nutrient-dense.
My fault, I wrote it with an 's' just because I looked for the seaweed around and I found it written as 'dulse'. I in fact don't pronounce it with the 's'. :P :D
The etymology is completely distinct tho, not a cognate.
From Old Irish duilesc (compare Scottish Gaelic duileasg), from Proto-Celtic doliskos, duliskos (compare Welsh delysg), from Proto-Indo-European dʰelh₁- (“to bloom, be green”) (compare duille (“leaf”)).
Whereas Latin 'dulcis' comes from PIE dl̥kús ("sweet")
Actually probably cognate with Latin 'folium' (Italian foglia, French 'feuille'). EDIT: Actually no. Not sure there's a Latin cognate at all; the dʰelh₁ PIE doesn't seem to have evolved to "Leaf" in Latin and the Greek word for "bloom" was borrowed instead? Something like that.
I am not an Irish (or any kind of Celtic) speaker but orthography for those languages looks absolutely crazy to me. Both Welsh and Irish / Scottish Gaelic look like languages that might have benefited from their own alphabet, or at least the addition of some diacritical marks.
We also have no real idea how proto-Celtic or even Gaulish or early old Irish would have been pronounced. Only best guesses. We have inscriptions in e.g Gaulish from Roman times but they look to me suspiciously Latinized.
And then look at English.. it's a mismash of a bunch of different orthograpic conventions -- Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Nordic, Latin, Greek... and makes no sense. Even us native speakers have no absolute certainty how to pronounce a word they've never seen before.
I happened upon that seaweed farm in Garibaldi last fall when we were over on the coast. Bought a bag of it directly from the tank. It didn't exactly taste like bacon, but it was an umami bomb. If I lived over there I'd probably eat it pretty regularly.
I'm not sure how local it is to east anglia and kent but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samphire is still eaten. Its not /technically/ seaweed but its not far off.
Haha, I clicked on comment to be the token Northern Irishman bringing this up, but you beat me to it!
I didn't know seaweed wasn't a common food until I moved to the Netherlands and started enquiring about the local seaweed, only to be met with blank looks or people pointing me to the sushi nori at Albert Heijn.
I've been here for years and I still don't understand how such a seafaring nation with such an intimate connection with the coast line could lack a seaweed culture.
Until I saw this article I was starting to think seaweed was unique to rockier island coastlines, but I guess it just comes down to taste/fashion?
After all, you can sail the seven seas as pillage the world of all its spices, but nothing compares to a broodje kaas! Have heard the theory that it's part of Calvinistic protestantism to avoid strong flavours, but then I'd expect to see more seaweed etc in the South.
Wasn't expecting to see Portstewart on Hacker News today but here we go!
Aye, I've only had the fresh stuff myself as a child. My aunties would rent a caravan down on the Strangford coast and we would go down to get it ourselves, and we'd pick mollusks from the rocks and other things of that nature. Some great memories there, thank you for bringing them to the fore.
Salty rubber is right. I don't actually like the stuff myself but I still enjoy eating it somehow! The iodine flavour is always the main thing for me, but I can see the appeal for sure.
>Have heard the theory that it's part of Calvinistic protestantism to avoid strong flavours
That's very believable. Puritan protestants banned all kinds of things that produce "pleasure". How do you think westerners got so prudish about intercourse?
> but then I'd expect to see more seaweed etc in the South.
Warmer waters carry less oxygen(I think that's the gist of it), so less seaweed grows.
Just think about a perfect beach, with clear blue waters and seeing all the way down to the sand on the seafloor... you know it's somewhere very warm and there's no seaweed.
Cheese and milk products in general are popular because it keeps well in winter, and large swathes of the country would get flooded on occasion; only grass would survive, which cows eat, and cows produce milk. Hard to build underground cold storage as well in case of flooding or just a high water table. Cheese will save us all.
Interestingly the Netherlands is actually one of the biggest markets for vegan cheese altnernatives. Many people here, even if they aren't vegan, try to limit their reliance on animal products for health, climate related or other moral reasons.
Moving here from London was a shock: I thought London was one of the better places for vegetarian food, I wasn’t prepared for the huge selection of vegan alternatives in everyday Dutch supermarkets
> Moving here from London was a shock: I thought London was one of the better places for vegetarian food, I wasn’t prepared for the huge selection of vegan alternatives in everyday Dutch supermarkets
They are often the source for lots of Asian ingredients in mainland Europe, while I was in the UK we sourced lots of things like umeboshi and miso from Holland; to my surprise being from CA with lots of access to Japanese/Chinese/Korean ingredients I found lots of the Dutch stuff to be really good.
I'm not sure if that has to do their with relationship (and desire for it's food) with Japan during the isolation period, but there were lots of Japanese products in a biodyanmic farm/shop I worked at in Germany too.
Sadly, it was rather limited in scope because they are the main exporters of conventional food in the EU for a reason.
Lol we really aren't as unique as we think, are we? I had the inverse experience.
After a few years living in the NL I was travelling home via London. I'd come to love vegan food while living here and expected London would be beyond my wildest dreams for choices, being so big and so diverse.
Imagine my dissappointment when I went to the shop and the closest thing to a vegan option I could find was a cheese and egg sandwich!
Ended op going to Boots where I found mint and sweetpeas.
Ancient people did not see animals are beings with feeling, they were seen as useful production machines.
It's only in modern times that we have the luxury of taking the animal's feeling into account at all. I'm sure you would want even more consideration for the animals, but it's much better today than it was.
How do you know that "ancient people" never thought of animals as having feelings? Seems an extraordinarily broad claim given all the cultures and ages that encompass "ancient people"
Because I read some of their writings? The concept of a "Pet" was foreign to them. Animals - even dogs, were there to work.
The concept of how an animal was feeling simply didn't occur to them. An animal was a tool, and you took good care of the tool, but not because of the tool, but because then it was more useful.
It was the 18th century when animal rights started becoming a thing, which exactly corresponds with the industrial age when things became less scarce and people could worry about animals, and not just themselves.
"Some of", indeed. The poster above is correct that your statements are over-broad.
There are hundreds of Roman monuments, inscriptions, and poems [celebrating dogs](https://thepetrifiedmuse.blog/2015/06/20/every-dog-has-his-d...) as companions and pets. There are medieval European graves that strongly suggest sentimentality towards the animals buried in them. There's this [lovely ninth-century Irish poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48267/...) about a cat. Someone with more knowledge in the area than I possess should comment on animal portraiture in ancient and early-modern China and Japan, but that was a thing as well.
I think the fairest thing to say is that people in every era - very much including today - instrumentalize some animals, and sentimentalize others.
You read some writing by some "ancient" people (post writing 'ancient it seems) and you're launching into broad sweeping generalisations about all "ancient people" ?
Wow.
Meanwhile, I've travelled a lot for work - mostly to odd corners of the world, and I've yet to meet people that didn't have stories about animals and animal behaviours.
Famously, for example, Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories are largely about animals, Tiddalick the Frog, Emu and the Jabiru, etc.
They encapsulate the place of animals in the environment, and as hunter gatherers attuned to where next years meal will come from, attention is paid to breeding and caring for the young so that there are full grown adults to breed again and to eat.
Rightly or wrongly the stories are about the imagined feelings of animals, the things that make them happy and plentiful, the bad things that cause numbers to dwindle.
Various people had various relationships with various animals, not as "pets" but as other beings in the world.
I mean even my own currently-alive ancestors (farmers, the majority of them) don't look at livestock as living, conscious beings. They obviously care for each animal and give them a swift and as-painless-as-possible butchering when the time comes, but they're not the bleeding hearts that many people these days are, they're mostly just vehicles for vital necessities.
I don't find it difficult to imagine my great-great-great-great-(fill in the appropriate number of greats here to qualify for ancient ancestors) grandmother butchering a pig and not really giving it a second thought at all, having grown up on a farm myself. Hell, my current grandma is probably much gentler and gives the pork a much better time than my ancient ancestors did
They probably misunderstood scale to mean something like “in the ways,” not more literally “by the numbers.” I’ve seen people suggest that we’re more savage and brutal towards animals these days on other websites, and I think that’s an absurd conclusion to draw because I don’t think we have sufficient evidence for it. It seems unquestionable that we’re doing it to more animals, though. There are more people eating far more animals these days. I suppose some might argue they aren’t suffering or something? That’s crazy, to me.
I don't think our ancestors had the luxury of being vegan.
on the evolutionary scale, this is provably false. all the great apes are vegetarian. we have flat, grinding teeth like cows, and long intestinal tracts like cows too -- not the quick, short intestinal tracts of predators or their sharp, pointy teeth.
strictly speaking, not even cows are vegan. not absolutely, perfectly, and totally. one of the weird side effects of ubiquitous cameras today is people have caught cows eating birds that were trapped in fences. it doesn't happen a lot, but it happens.
but overall, with a reasonable margin of approximation, then yes, our ancestors were definitely vegan, at least our evolutionary ones.
1.) Can you just admit that your original claims are debunked by wikipedia?
2.) Of course 1.8 Million years matter in Evolution. Please make you familiar with the Wikipedia article instead being a pseudo sceptical.
That makes a lot of sense actually, thanks for the insight! I guess that kind of chimes with the Dutch passion for preservation as well, with the salted herring etc. Anything you can preserve you can sell further afield as well!
You also reminded me of something I heard on the great History of the Netherlands podcast from the University of Amsterdam. Apparently back in the day in Friesland they would tether their cows to something and let them float when the regular flooding came.
But speaking of the flooding: I can see how that would be bad for other kinds of crops, but surely seaweed would actually be pretty notable for dealing well water? Sounds like even more reason why I'd expect to see it as part of the culinary traditions here.
I deplore cheese. It’s a personal thing but I just cannot fathom people eat rotten solidified milk. Same applies to yogurt. I’ll happily eat seaweed and insects though.
Typically you get Salicornia in the Netherlands which is not strictly seaweed but I guess somewhat comparible (aquatic plants is I guess what they call it in the article)
Ah yes samphire! Zeekreel. Funny enough it's something I've seen growing at home in Ireland but never thought it was something I could be eating. I'll check that out for sure, thank you.
I suspect Dutchies used to eat quite a bit of seaweed and aquatic plants (and that some still do, zeekraal is fairly popular), but that it was just forgotten by most Dutch people/culture.
If you're interested you might want to look for hiking/walking tours into the dunes with some nature-freak and/or chef. Or do some internet searching. I recall going on walks with guides as a kid with the family and they would point out tons of stuff that was edible, but somehow ceased to be popular food.
This reminds me of some other losses of Dutch identity/tradition: Dutch folkloric dances (almost no Dutch person will be able to tell you what they where) or the fact that only Japanese seem to know what "Dutch coffee" is.
That's a brilliant idea, I'll definitely look for those, thank you.
I know what you mean about the dancing too. I play traditional music from Ireland and we have a regular folk dance evening here in Rotterdam. It's always a pity that we have to look so far afield for the music and the steps.
From what I've heard there's a perception in Dutch society that folk dance would be mainly associated with the far right. Do you recognise that? Always surprises me because at home the traditional music is very much anti colonial.
They're growing dulse on the Oregon Coast at Garibaldi now. I bought some directly from the grower when I was there last year. Made it into a vegan burger that was an umami bomb.
In the Republic, they have carrageen; which is a seaweed in the Irish Sea. It's used as a natural thickener and ingredient in foodstuffs like Carrageen Moss Pudding:
i've never understood why it isn't given out free in pubs - its a pittance to source, and my god, it gives you a thirst. Not to mention it tapping into some kind of trad-pub vibes
I have started to use this in some soup stocks instead of anchovy paste. Very tasty. Throw a few strips into boiling water, strain out after 15 minutes, and you have a decent broth. You can also sub chard out of recipes for it in some cases. Its still seaweed, so I would only serve to those who already eat it. If someone doesn't like sushi rolls because of seaweed, I wouldn't push it.
In the US it is widely available dried along with several others, but is quite expensive. It sounds like Maine Coast Sea Vegetables can't harvest enough to keep up with demand (although flakes or powder are available in bulk). Nori seems like the most popular seaweed in the US, though. I tried a bunch of varieties years ago and found dulse to be my favorite snack seaweed both from the flavor (I like it better than nori) and because it is easy to eat out of the bag while others (besides nori) are quite stiff if you try that.
I came here to mention Ireland. Seaweed was a huge food supplement during the famine for those on the west coast, especially. Still in practice today to a degree. I love Ireland.
On the other side of the Irish Sea there's a seaweed dish in Wales called laverbread, I guess there's something about that sea that makes particularly edible seaweed.
While dulse (which comes from the Gaelic duileasg) grows in cold-water pockets of the North Atlantic and Pacific from Canada to Scotland, “it’s as Irish as potatoes,” according to chef, writer and director of Slow Food Northern Ireland, Paula McIntyre. [0]
Given potatoes are part of the post-Columbian exchange, dulse might be more Irish than potatoes.
> Some of us still do! It's tricky to find it fresh, you usually only get it in small greengrocers or at the Auld Lammas fair. Used to be quite cheap for a bag. Very salty but quite edible and said to be nutrient-dense.
I had some potatoes from the Island of Jersey when I was working in kitchens in London, they were incredibly good and paired well with seafood dishes: I had to do some research on a dish my Sous had asked me to create with them and I found out why they were so well matched.
Turns out the Isle of Jersey is often covered in seaweed [0], and they use it extensively in the cultivation of it's potatoes. So even indirectly they are eaten even though things like wakame and kombu are not common outside of fine-dining in London they are still a main-stay of the British diet, well if you Jersey Royals at least.
I wouldn't say that Dulce/Dilsk/Dillisk is 'lesser known' at all! And along the west coast of Ireland, it's also commonly eaten, and works great as a flavour enhancer in stews.
Now, it is served in avantgarde restaurants: e.g. by the Spanish Michelin star chef, Angel León. He is known as “chef del mar”, making novel dishes with the plants from the ocean in his restaurant, Aponiente:
https://www.aponiente.com/en/
I've thought about harvesting and eating seaweed which is basically everywhere near my home village. I've never heard of anyone eating it and I've been wondering why. How would I go about figuring out if a particular species of seaweed is edible or not (Google doesn't seem to help me in this)?
Interesting question. They are called Sea Vegetables. But they do need seawater. Now seawater aquariums are a thing so it should be manageable to "farm" those.
A few. Marine upper plants are very rare, but red algae are harvested. There are several cultured marine Protists (I wouldn't say domesticated, but this is debatable) and also aquatic Cyanobacteria.
You got to find a local foraging group or just knowledgeable individual. If it's edible someone is eating it. But practical foraging is dominated by local concerns like microseasons, regional land/industrial history, soil & water quality etc.
For those in the Bay Area - Kirk Lombard author of The Sea Forager's Guide to the Northern California Coast (at least used to) do some guided tours harvesting flora and fauna of the Norcal coast. Enjoyable and informative. Here's the book
You can buy packaged nori and eat is as a snack. Also, Onigiri is wrapped in nori, and the Japanese developed a special technique to keep it separated from the rice (so it stays crispy) until you open the package.
Also Japanese people regularly eat mozuku, mekabu, and include seaweed in just about everything in the cuisine at least through dashi but also in many other forms. Seaweed is and always has been huge in Japanese cuisine.
Tripe is exactly what I was thinking of as I read the GP. It's just...not very good. Same with pig's ear, or tendons. They're not bad foods and they don't turn my stomach, but I'd rather eat pretty much any other part of an animal.
No one is asking you to eat any intestines... but why common mushrooms, that are abundant, replaced by literally only ONE species?
Your regular store will have 5 types of mushrooms, that are all literally the same mushroom at different stages of maturity. (Agaricus bisporus is typically the ONLY fresh mushroom available at supermarkets in US)
It's the consequence of the food industry becoming hyperindustrialized in which uncommon ingredients and "off-cuts" no longer fit with the goal of pursuing economy of scale. Ultraprocessed food is efficient to produce and distribute and formulated to specifically target innate human cravings (high sugar/sodium/carb/fat) in ways that were not possible before.
This is a trend that started in the U.S. and gradually spread out across industrialized nations in the post-WWII world as globalization accelerated. However even for Americans, offal used to be a common ingredient before and during WWII: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gidc5a/when_...
> It's the consequence of the food industry becoming hyperindustrialized in which uncommon ingredients and "off-cuts" no longer fit with the goal of pursuing economy of scale. Ultraprocessed food is efficient to produce and distribute and formulated to specifically target innate human cravings (high sugar/sodium/carb/fat) in ways that were not possible before.
Hyperindustrialization has done the exact opposite! The middle class can only afford prime rib and tenderloin because more than half the weight of the cow gets processed into gelatin, burgers, pet food, and stew meat (A friend and I split a whole cow from a local butcher but my stats are based on grass fed). The price of off cuts is entirely demand driven: i.e. flank cuts that are popular in Latin American cuisine are dirt cheap in New England but really expensive in California. Stuff like offal absolutely dominates pet food inputs.
I gather the GP's point was we that previously we'd eat kidneys or livers or tripe etc. in "unprocessed" form, whereas now they're all only used for pet food or gelatin etc. Whether that's true because steak is now so cheap and most people prefer eating it instead I'm not sure, but seems plausible. But that steak is cheap because of hyperprocessing of off cuts seems more contentious - I'm fairly sure we're able to more cheaply raise, slaughter and butcher cows in general, and the beef industry would still find a way to be profitable even if offal etc. was still widely consumed in unprocessed form.
It is odd that I remember regularly tucking into things like beef liver as part of a meal as a kid (30 odd years ago) but virtually never hear of it these days. I still do see steak & kidney pie in bakeries etc. but it's not super common. Oh I did have tripe in phở not too long ago (and still see it on menus regularly), though I can't admit to being a fan.
Why do you think people in North America no longer see offal (or seaweed) as edible food for humans despite the opposite? It's because of hyperindustrialization has distorted how these people view food ingredients.
What are you talking about? Tripe is a bog standard ingredient in Mexican cuisine seen on every menu from the southern tip of Mexico to Toronto. It’s the basis for sausages and hot dogs, an American staple. You can buy offal at almost any supermarket. Why would they carry it if people in North America didn’t see it as food?
The reason most Americans don’t eat it is better options. Like rib eye steak and a salad.
You can also buy multiple forms of seaweed at Costco and Walmart. That’s about as North American as it gets.
You know which socio-cultural group I am talking about and it's not Mexicans. Sausage casings are also overwhelmingly synthetic especially for mass manufactured hotdogs.
Premium cuts became "better options" because of hyperindustrialization, which made those cuts more affordable than before. This is a point you raised yourself in an earlier comment.
The only reason you can buy seaweed at Costco and Walmart is because of multicultural immigrants and globalization, which are starting to undo the hyperindustrialization of the food industry even if by just a little bit.
Sorry, but you can't buy all offal in most American supermarkets.
Living in NYC, where you can get both tripe and liver easily - you have to go to "ethnic" stores to get heart, kidneys or lungs. (I have yet to see any lungs or intestines in any US store... and I mean ANY. I'd have to go to a butcher and order small intestines to make sausages.)
As for seaweed - it's primarily dried Japanese style seaweed that we can get in Costco's around NYC.
A lot of people don't know how to use these ingredients. For offal, I would need a lot of videos showing me how to make really delicious things with some of the parts before I would even bother trying. Also, whenever I see organs at ethnic markets, they're whole organs, and I don't really have much butchering experience since everything I normally buy is already precut into appropriate sizes (eg single chicken breast/thigh/leg, steak of appropriate thickness).
I don't think British food is any less industrialised, but seaweed (local, not just in Asian food) is still available here, and stuff like kidneys and liver is downright popular! Even corner shops often sell steak and kidney pies, or a microwave meal of liver and onions.
Not sure what countries or places you mean, but I lived in Spain for 13 years near Valencia and have never seen this at a meal. Maybe in sushi, doesn't count imo.
Related: Not a seaweed, but sea fennel (also samphire and official name crithnum maritimum) is a plant that grows on rocks by the sea and is edible (actually nutritious and quite tasty as salad).
I've eaten a wide variety of weird food over the years. I recently tried a kelp burger and it was better than expected. I also felt pretty good after eating it. Would eat again.
Dried seaweed is delicious, and seaweed salad (sushi-style) even moreso. Both are available in nearly every grocery store in the US. Even my 3 year old niece loves the dry stuff.
Anecdotally, I once worked with a guy who told me his wife was so hooked on seaweed is healthy she ate too much of it over time and the iodine destroyed her thyroid.
carrageenan causes me some digestive distress; its amazing how many things its in. There's a couple ice cream brands without it, for example, but you'd better check ingredients anyway.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadFor Bay Area people, there are companies that teach seaweed foraging: what types to look for, where to look, healthy versus "on the toilet all day", etc. Always nice to have another excuse to go to the beach, especially at unusual hours (such as before dawn to catch a low tide).
They might have noticed that eating a little amount of seaweed will prevent illness.
For omega-3 fatty acids, they had much better food sources in bone marrow or in fish (the multicellular algae have very low content of fatty acids; those that are used for omega-3 fatty acid production are unicellular and they are not algae, even if they are named "algae" in advertisements and on labels, because it is believed that something like "straminipiles" would be incomprehensible for laymen; even many scientists misspell "straminipiles" as "stramenopiles", only "Straminipila" is correct Latin).
The vitamins were also abundant in their food, only iodine is deficient in all terrestrial food.
Evolution works through reproduction so any condition that doesn't impact survival until sexual maturity is unlikely to face any evolutionary pressure. Since humans are tribal and took care of their offspring in group settings, survivability after procreation also has little effect.
[1] https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/43010/9241592001...
Diseases that impact even just appearance can surely make you less attractive as a mate though. And larger goiters can impede breathing or swallowing. So I'd be suspicious of the idea that we've been significantly deficient in iodine for extended periods of our evolutionary history.
I’d be far more suspicious of applying modern standards of beauty to humans that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Ruminants are more efficient at absorbing nutrients from plant material due their digestive system, and this is how they get iodine in non-coastal areas.
All vertebrates have thyroid glands and there is a very similar organ in marine chordates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endostyle. So this is an organ that likely emerged when our biological ancestors still lived in a iodine-rich environment.
Some places still (mostly) don’t. A notable exception (I’m sure there are others but not as well reported) is Israel where iodized salt isn’t a regulatory requirement and not very popular, with (predictable) widespread deficiencies:
https://ijhpr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13584-020-...
https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/2017-03-27/ty-art...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170327083438.h...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laverbread
I also really enjoy most seaweeds I've tried. Great food generally. I'll have to see if we can get something of laverbread locally.
It was savoury, not sweet, great for breakfast with bacon etc.
I think one of the reasons for people not liking it is western diets tend not to like rubbery textures in food.
If the biomarkers are able to remain detectable for thousands of years without breaking down, perhaps they're also able to accumulate in fish?
I don't know anything about it so my idea is probably wrong, but I'm surprised the article doesn't mention it since it seems like an obvious thing to wonder.
The taste depends a lot of the type of seaweed.
> They found the chemical biomarkers of seaweed and aquatic plants in 26 samples, which suggests that early humans were eating—or, at the very least, chewing—these bounties from the sea
Like, yeah maybe the fish they were eating was covered with seaweed, but unless they were popping the stomach/intestines into their mouth... for the parasite load(?), the seaweed in the fish is digested. This isn't Carbon-14 dating, they identified families of plants on the the ancient teeth, not digested plant matter.
And the article doesn't make any mention of which specific biomarkers they chose or whether they're affected by digestion. They're obviously pretty hardy compounds to begin with if they're not broken down by saliva to begin with, or thousands of years of natural decay.
And it does seem kind of akin to carbon-14 dating. It's not like they found actual recognizable pieces of the plants in between their teeth or anything.
>Aquatic ecosystems are complex with some isotopic variability even within the same species of seaweed, freshwater algae, and freshwater aquatic plants (macrophytes), making use of this C&N isotopic data to detect these resources somewhat challenging, certainly where it represents <20% of the diet. Moreover, while stable isotopic analysis remains valuable in providing a broad view of major foods consumed, this is dependent on the dietary protein intake, with seaweeds lower in protein compared to meat or fish, and can therefore be overlooked due to equifinality, where other foods can, in combination, be used to explain the stable isotopic data observed, sometimes in contradiction to other archaeological evidence available.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41671-2#Sec8
Including seaweed in one's diet may have worked for people but living exclusively on seaweed seems to have problems.
Always hard to tell if researchers are really as dull as these press releases make them to seem, or it's just academia's form of clickbait. Did anyone in their right mind really think that people went "ok, we've found a very labor intensive way to have food available for a relatively short period of a year, conditional on lots of factors like the weather, pests, disease, etc... time to put the kibosh on all other processes of generating caloric intake that we've honed for millennia!"
Most of the ethnicities we associate with Europeans are Indo-European in origin: pastoral, patriarchal nomads who swept down from the steppe in the distant past.
If the pre-Indo-Europeans disappeared quickly enough or were culturally overwhelmed, it makes sense that unfamiliar foods from the sea would be ignored by agriculture oriented steppe people.
Which is not to say that people living in these places didn't continue to eat seaweed, because they did.
But still, two radically different food producing paradigms meeting an established hunter-gatherer population could lead to some of the traditional foraged foods from the region being ignored.
I don’t know if seaweed is eaten or even prevalent in the seas around Anatolia, but steppe based cultures who drive herds would be likely to ignore it IMO
If you look at the more recent history of the agricultural settlement of other parts of the world, it's not too different. North America the most recent, but parts of Africa as well. Hunter gatherers have low population densities over often very large territories, and are sensitive to disruptions in animal migrations; but when they're able to forage and hunt reliably their diets are actually often much better than agricultural populations and involve less overall labour. So they don't necessarily just give it up because somehow agriculture is better.
... and even the proto-Indo-European pastoralists of the steppe continued to forage wild grains and plants (rather than plant wheat like their neighbours to the west) for almost a millennia after domesticating horses and cattle. David Anthony gets into this in "Horse, Wheel, Language". And it wasn't because they didn't know how, they just preferred not to. Settling down to plant crops has trade-offs. (I say this as a person with a pile of pre-winter garden chores I'm procrastinating...)
This is news to me, do you have a reference you can share?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Doln%C3%AD_V%C4%9Bsto...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stone_Age_art
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180522-the-renaissance-...
It's tricky to find it fresh, you usually only get it in small greengrocers or at the Auld Lammas fair. Used to be quite cheap for a bag. Very salty but quite edible and said to be nutrient-dense.
Actually an export product, too. https://www.dal.ca/news/2017/08/03/nova-scotia-s-best-kept-s...
From Old Irish duilesc (compare Scottish Gaelic duileasg), from Proto-Celtic doliskos, duliskos (compare Welsh delysg), from Proto-Indo-European dʰelh₁- (“to bloom, be green”) (compare duille (“leaf”)).
Whereas Latin 'dulcis' comes from PIE dl̥kús ("sweet")
Actually probably cognate with Latin 'folium' (Italian foglia, French 'feuille'). EDIT: Actually no. Not sure there's a Latin cognate at all; the dʰelh₁ PIE doesn't seem to have evolved to "Leaf" in Latin and the Greek word for "bloom" was borrowed instead? Something like that.
> Note that phonetically dulce in NI would be pronounced "dulis."
is interesting in that the modern pronunciation looks much closer to the ancient pronunciation than the modern spelling is to either. What happened?
We also have no real idea how proto-Celtic or even Gaulish or early old Irish would have been pronounced. Only best guesses. We have inscriptions in e.g Gaulish from Roman times but they look to me suspiciously Latinized.
And then look at English.. it's a mismash of a bunch of different orthograpic conventions -- Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Nordic, Latin, Greek... and makes no sense. Even us native speakers have no absolute certainty how to pronounce a word they've never seen before.
not. Dulce means sweet or candy in Spanish, but not fresh
Apparently when prepared right it tastes like bacon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laverbread
I didn't know seaweed wasn't a common food until I moved to the Netherlands and started enquiring about the local seaweed, only to be met with blank looks or people pointing me to the sushi nori at Albert Heijn.
I've been here for years and I still don't understand how such a seafaring nation with such an intimate connection with the coast line could lack a seaweed culture.
Until I saw this article I was starting to think seaweed was unique to rockier island coastlines, but I guess it just comes down to taste/fashion?
After all, you can sail the seven seas as pillage the world of all its spices, but nothing compares to a broodje kaas! Have heard the theory that it's part of Calvinistic protestantism to avoid strong flavours, but then I'd expect to see more seaweed etc in the South.
It tastes a LOT nicer fresh. But that's not saying a lot, I mean it still tastes like salty rubber.
As for the content below, that it tastes like bacon?? I mean, yeeeeeaaaaaahhh? In the same way that a used condom might taste of bacon?
Aye, I've only had the fresh stuff myself as a child. My aunties would rent a caravan down on the Strangford coast and we would go down to get it ourselves, and we'd pick mollusks from the rocks and other things of that nature. Some great memories there, thank you for bringing them to the fore.
Salty rubber is right. I don't actually like the stuff myself but I still enjoy eating it somehow! The iodine flavour is always the main thing for me, but I can see the appeal for sure.
That's very believable. Puritan protestants banned all kinds of things that produce "pleasure". How do you think westerners got so prudish about intercourse?
> but then I'd expect to see more seaweed etc in the South.
Warmer waters carry less oxygen(I think that's the gist of it), so less seaweed grows.
Just think about a perfect beach, with clear blue waters and seeing all the way down to the sand on the seafloor... you know it's somewhere very warm and there's no seaweed.
Except vegans, of course.
They are often the source for lots of Asian ingredients in mainland Europe, while I was in the UK we sourced lots of things like umeboshi and miso from Holland; to my surprise being from CA with lots of access to Japanese/Chinese/Korean ingredients I found lots of the Dutch stuff to be really good.
I'm not sure if that has to do their with relationship (and desire for it's food) with Japan during the isolation period, but there were lots of Japanese products in a biodyanmic farm/shop I worked at in Germany too.
Sadly, it was rather limited in scope because they are the main exporters of conventional food in the EU for a reason.
After a few years living in the NL I was travelling home via London. I'd come to love vegan food while living here and expected London would be beyond my wildest dreams for choices, being so big and so diverse.
Imagine my dissappointment when I went to the shop and the closest thing to a vegan option I could find was a cheese and egg sandwich!
Ended op going to Boots where I found mint and sweetpeas.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9792889/
It's only in modern times that we have the luxury of taking the animal's feeling into account at all. I'm sure you would want even more consideration for the animals, but it's much better today than it was.
The concept of how an animal was feeling simply didn't occur to them. An animal was a tool, and you took good care of the tool, but not because of the tool, but because then it was more useful.
It was the 18th century when animal rights started becoming a thing, which exactly corresponds with the industrial age when things became less scarce and people could worry about animals, and not just themselves.
There are hundreds of Roman monuments, inscriptions, and poems [celebrating dogs](https://thepetrifiedmuse.blog/2015/06/20/every-dog-has-his-d...) as companions and pets. There are medieval European graves that strongly suggest sentimentality towards the animals buried in them. There's this [lovely ninth-century Irish poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48267/...) about a cat. Someone with more knowledge in the area than I possess should comment on animal portraiture in ancient and early-modern China and Japan, but that was a thing as well.
I think the fairest thing to say is that people in every era - very much including today - instrumentalize some animals, and sentimentalize others.
Wow.
Meanwhile, I've travelled a lot for work - mostly to odd corners of the world, and I've yet to meet people that didn't have stories about animals and animal behaviours.
Famously, for example, Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories are largely about animals, Tiddalick the Frog, Emu and the Jabiru, etc.
They encapsulate the place of animals in the environment, and as hunter gatherers attuned to where next years meal will come from, attention is paid to breeding and caring for the young so that there are full grown adults to breed again and to eat.
Rightly or wrongly the stories are about the imagined feelings of animals, the things that make them happy and plentiful, the bad things that cause numbers to dwindle.
Various people had various relationships with various animals, not as "pets" but as other beings in the world.
For example: Ngarritj - the Yolngu speaking bird
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbSxc6Y1aVA
I don't find it difficult to imagine my great-great-great-great-(fill in the appropriate number of greats here to qualify for ancient ancestors) grandmother butchering a pig and not really giving it a second thought at all, having grown up on a farm myself. Hell, my current grandma is probably much gentler and gives the pork a much better time than my ancient ancestors did
- Mahavira, 6th century BC
(Translated, of course.)
It's sad this type of trolling is becoming tolerated on HN.
on the evolutionary scale, this is provably false. all the great apes are vegetarian. we have flat, grinding teeth like cows, and long intestinal tracts like cows too -- not the quick, short intestinal tracts of predators or their sharp, pointy teeth.
strictly speaking, not even cows are vegan. not absolutely, perfectly, and totally. one of the weird side effects of ubiquitous cameras today is people have caught cows eating birds that were trapped in fences. it doesn't happen a lot, but it happens.
but overall, with a reasonable margin of approximation, then yes, our ancestors were definitely vegan, at least our evolutionary ones.
" their sharp, pointy teeth." Humen can create weapons and fire. No need for long teeth.
Australopithecus did eat animals. "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus#Diet"
Its a common misconception among vegetarians that humen were originally vegetarians. Quiet the opposite is true.
we have evidence for hunter gathering societies since 1.8 million years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Archaeological...
Humen can create weapons and fire. No need for long teeth.
sure. is that evolution or technology?
idk if that's really worth the effort, but I admit it, you made a point.
edit: to everybody else, I apologize for the passive-aggressive vibe, I just don't see where else this (requested!) reply can really go.
You also reminded me of something I heard on the great History of the Netherlands podcast from the University of Amsterdam. Apparently back in the day in Friesland they would tether their cows to something and let them float when the regular flooding came.
But speaking of the flooding: I can see how that would be bad for other kinds of crops, but surely seaweed would actually be pretty notable for dealing well water? Sounds like even more reason why I'd expect to see it as part of the culinary traditions here.
If you're interested you might want to look for hiking/walking tours into the dunes with some nature-freak and/or chef. Or do some internet searching. I recall going on walks with guides as a kid with the family and they would point out tons of stuff that was edible, but somehow ceased to be popular food.
This reminds me of some other losses of Dutch identity/tradition: Dutch folkloric dances (almost no Dutch person will be able to tell you what they where) or the fact that only Japanese seem to know what "Dutch coffee" is.
I know what you mean about the dancing too. I play traditional music from Ireland and we have a regular folk dance evening here in Rotterdam. It's always a pity that we have to look so far afield for the music and the steps.
From what I've heard there's a perception in Dutch society that folk dance would be mainly associated with the far right. Do you recognise that? Always surprises me because at home the traditional music is very much anti colonial.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/carrageen-moss-pudding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrageenan#Food_and_other_dom...
Not uncommon in Canada, especially eastern coast.
You can find it in grocery stores sometimes. Price has nearly doubled in the last few years.
https://www.amazon.ca/stores/page/6A642280-AC30-4571-9ECB-08...
I've also seen it sold in little bags in pubs in the Republic of Ireland!
Given potatoes are part of the post-Columbian exchange, dulse might be more Irish than potatoes.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180522-the-renaissance-...
I had some potatoes from the Island of Jersey when I was working in kitchens in London, they were incredibly good and paired well with seafood dishes: I had to do some research on a dish my Sous had asked me to create with them and I found out why they were so well matched.
Turns out the Isle of Jersey is often covered in seaweed [0], and they use it extensively in the cultivation of it's potatoes. So even indirectly they are eaten even though things like wakame and kombu are not common outside of fine-dining in London they are still a main-stay of the British diet, well if you Jersey Royals at least.
0: https://jerseyroyals.co.uk/about-us/
And whether the water is clean enough for it to be safe. Good luck though!
A few. Marine upper plants are very rare, but red algae are harvested. There are several cultured marine Protists (I wouldn't say domesticated, but this is debatable) and also aquatic Cyanobacteria.
China grows most of them. Japan or Korea also.
Here is some information: https://gallowaywildfoods.com/an-introduction-to-seaweed-for...
https://www.seaforager.com/book
Check your water first.
https://marutaka-nori.co.jp/en/nori1.html#:~:text=The%20hist....
Also, wakame as a salad or in miso soup.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chondracanthus_chamissoi
'Sea grape', also in (South East) Asia, is quite delicious in salads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caulerpa_lentillifera
Is the article supposed to be surprising or just keeping us updated on the oldest findings? It seems it thinks the former.
Only a few peoples stopped consuming traditional foods, as one might expect.
And if you have a problem with the chewiness, you can substitute oyster mushrooms.
No one is asking you to eat any intestines... but why common mushrooms, that are abundant, replaced by literally only ONE species?
Your regular store will have 5 types of mushrooms, that are all literally the same mushroom at different stages of maturity. (Agaricus bisporus is typically the ONLY fresh mushroom available at supermarkets in US)
This is a trend that started in the U.S. and gradually spread out across industrialized nations in the post-WWII world as globalization accelerated. However even for Americans, offal used to be a common ingredient before and during WWII: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gidc5a/when_...
Hyperindustrialization has done the exact opposite! The middle class can only afford prime rib and tenderloin because more than half the weight of the cow gets processed into gelatin, burgers, pet food, and stew meat (A friend and I split a whole cow from a local butcher but my stats are based on grass fed). The price of off cuts is entirely demand driven: i.e. flank cuts that are popular in Latin American cuisine are dirt cheap in New England but really expensive in California. Stuff like offal absolutely dominates pet food inputs.
The reason most Americans don’t eat it is better options. Like rib eye steak and a salad.
You can also buy multiple forms of seaweed at Costco and Walmart. That’s about as North American as it gets.
Premium cuts became "better options" because of hyperindustrialization, which made those cuts more affordable than before. This is a point you raised yourself in an earlier comment.
The only reason you can buy seaweed at Costco and Walmart is because of multicultural immigrants and globalization, which are starting to undo the hyperindustrialization of the food industry even if by just a little bit.
Living in NYC, where you can get both tripe and liver easily - you have to go to "ethnic" stores to get heart, kidneys or lungs. (I have yet to see any lungs or intestines in any US store... and I mean ANY. I'd have to go to a butcher and order small intestines to make sausages.)
As for seaweed - it's primarily dried Japanese style seaweed that we can get in Costco's around NYC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crithmum
It is great for fiber and minerals.
All things in moderation.
/s