Kelp, Sea Otters and a Diet to Save the Planet

Okay, I admit it, I am as guilty as a Republican of believing what I want to believe whenever it gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling.  
So when I read Dana Goodyear's article in the November 2 New Yorker  about aquaculture growing seaweed to feed a hungry planet while cleansing the oceans, helping to soak up excess carbon dioxide, providing nutritious food that helps people lose weight by inhibiting fat absorption, delivering protein without cholesterol all I could think was: Oh, this could be good for sea otters.

I love sea otters the way Republicans hate government.  We have sea otters here in Hampton, N.H. They come into the salt marshes certain times of the year, when their pups are young, and they are beyond adorable.

Not that charismatic mammals should affect the way I think about the ecosystem, but they do. I admit it. 

And the ecosystem is  complicated. It's so complicated you can see it just about any way you want to--so Republicans see the ecosystem as a vast liberal media plot to kill the coal industry and the glorious oil companies. I see it as a way to think about sea otters.

Sea otters are big fans of kelp, so they are relevant. Actually, they don't care a whit about kelp--what they like is to eat sea urchins who just gobble up kelp like foxes go through chicken coops. And otters eat sea urchins the way my Labrador retriever eats, well, just about anything--pocket lint, biscuits, anything.  

Gotta Love It

Sea otters, especially on the West Coast, have not had an easy time, over the past century or two. First it was people, who killed them for pelts and just about drove them to extinction. So the sea urchins were left uneaten, to decimate the kelp forests and the chain reaction of loss of the kelp forests and with them kelp's capacity to soak up CO2. 
 But then there was a law--that horrid thing called the federal government put a law (and regulations) into effect (those horrid tings called "regulations" which thwart free enterprise and all that entrepreneurial spirit) and this law saved the sea otters. 

Sea Urchins: The Scourge of Kelp Forests

People, however, were not done with doing bad things which got to sea otters: People hunted whales down to low numbers and without enough whales to eat, (so the story goes,) whale predators called orcas found  their preferred meals in decline or completely depleted, and orcas eventually turned to feasting on sea otters, who then could not eat the urchins who then ate every kelp forest right into near oblivion. 

Still with me? It's a chain reaction thing, we are talking about here.

Move over Kansas and Iowa: The farm belt of the future, Long Island Sound

Or so the story goes.  
But then there were agreements among some people (not the Japanese or the Norwegians, but among other people) and so the whales came back and the orcas were happy to shift back from skimpy sea otters, which are like tapas meals for orcas, who prefer big plate meals, and so the otters got another reprieve from extinction.

Okay, so it's a seal, but they eat otters, too.

All this came to mind when Dana Goodyear started telling the story of Bren Smith, who is farming kelp off the New Haven harbor in the Long Island Sound, and he raises things like clams and mussels and scallops who filter water and are good environmental citizens.  But kelp and seaweed are the big game changers potentially, if we could just convince more people to eat slimy things.

Not otter friendly

Personally, I like the look of sea weed. Down at Plaice Cove there are different sorts of sea weed: Some days there is this maroon sea weed three feet deep covering the beach. The next day--poof--it's gone. 
Then there is this pea soup green stuff with air bubbles which my dog eats whenever it washes up in profusion and then he vomits it up about 12 hours later.  Apparently, you need to slice and dice it and saute it and mix it with other stuff, but some types of seaweed can be cooked up to taste like bacon, which is encouraging, from a marketing point of view.  
Most people are fussier about what they eat than my dog, who, as I said before, is a Labrador and he eats just about anything. He is what some people might call an "adventurous eater," or perhaps, more accurately, an indiscriminate eater or a vacuum cleaner, but most people are more picky about what they eat.

There's a restaurant in the East Village in New York called "Superiority Burger" which serves seaweed burgers and lines form outside its door. People from Brooklyn love it. Dana Goodyear quotes a ten year old who is more articulate than 90% of my adult friends and must have an IQ of 230. Differentiating his own love of sea weed burgers from his sister's love of the more accessible potato chip-like SeaSnax treat,  this ten year old says:  "I'm the adventurous eater in my family. I hate SeaSnax. It's not like real seaweed. It's over-salted,over-olive-oiled. My sister likes anything that tastes normal. True story: if we put a plate of SeaSnax in front of her  she'd eat the whole thing."

I got distracted by this 10 year old. I think what he is saying is that only the adventurous eater will embrace sea weed burgers, where the hoi polloi will eat other forms of sea weed which taste like things they already know and like. 

But, eventually, if it can be marketed properly, and if the chefs can figure out how to make it more palatable, there'll be a huge market for seaweed burgers and we can shift from growing soy and corn and tobacco and mining coal and drilling for oil to farming kelp or macroalgae, as the cognoscenti call it, and eating seaweed burgers and kelp bacon.

Which means we'll need more kelp forests, and fewer sea urchins, which is where the sea otters will get a break. 

From the New Yorker's lips to God's ears.