We still eat laverbread [1], a gelatinous paste made from seaweed, in parts of Wales. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laverbread
My wife puts sugar kelp in soups over here in Alaska.
Early Europeans ate seaweed for thousands of years
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Re: Early Europeans ate seaweed for thousands of years
#22We still eat laverbread [1], a gelatinous paste made from seaweed, in parts of Wales. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laverbread
Visited a friend in Swansea last year and tried laverbread mixed with oats and pan-dried, and it was delicious!
Re: Early Europeans ate seaweed for thousands of years
#23[flagged]
We have 30k year old statues?
This is news to me, do you have a reference you can share?
Re: Early Europeans ate seaweed for thousands of years
#24Makes 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 ti…
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.
Re: Early Europeans ate seaweed for thousands of years
#25Some of us still do! In Northern Ireland, we have a lesser-known seaweed dish called Dulce. 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.
Kind of funny it's salty but it's called dulce/dulse (Spanish for 'sweet'). I'd love to know the pronunciation for 'Duileasg'
Re: Early Europeans ate seaweed for thousands of years
#26Makes 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 ti…
You also get omega-3 and omega-6 from seaweed.
Re: Early Europeans ate seaweed for thousands of years
#27> 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 avai…
Could it be evidence of cultural change? 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.
Re: Early Europeans ate seaweed for thousands of years
#28[flagged]
We have 30k year old statues? This is news to me, do you have a reference you can share?
Here is one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf
Re: Early Europeans ate seaweed for thousands of years
#29[flagged]
We have 30k year old statues? This is news to me, do you have a reference you can share?
I guess this might be what he's referring to;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf