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Seaweed is one of those incredibly delicious items[1] that for some strange reason isn't more popular. I'd love it if it became more common, and more cuisines (

Seaweed is one of those incredibly delicious items[1] that for some strange reason isn't more popular. I'd love it if it became more common, and more cuisines (outside Japan) incorporated it into their existing dishes. I'm imagining like an Indian curry with seaweed mixed in, or an Italian pasta with seaweed mixed in (in addition to existing ingredients)..... [1] if you buy it from a good brand, so YMMV.

bpicolo 3y ago
> in Italian pasta with seaweed mixed All the rage at Italian/Japanese fusion joints (and honestly in Japan too - Japan loves pasta)
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > All the rage at Italian/Japanese fusion joints Im going to take a wild guess and say this is not in Italy.
  - gtufano 3y ago
    I'm from Naples, in the south of Italy and, while pasta with seaweed is indeed not existing here (I can't even imagine why you should do that to pasta), fritter with seaweed are common, here --> cfr. https://blog.giallozafferano.it/studentiaifornelli/zeppoline-di-alghe/ https://blog.giallozafferano.it/studentiaifornelli/zeppoline...
    - SSLy 3y ago
      > I can't even imagine why you should do that to pasta it's all about that umami
  - bpicolo 3y ago
    Perhaps not, but not such a far cry from squid ink in pasta in terms of intended effect eh
ahzhou 3y ago
It’s incredibly common in every East Asian coastal cuisine. If you live near the coast, you can easily forage your own too.
opportune 3y ago
My mostly-uninformed hypothesis is that seaweed’s relative lack of popularity outside of East Asia stems from the industrialization timeline of Asia vs eg Europe. People in Europe could and did farm seaweed, but with the technology of the mid 19th century it was not possible to do so in a mechanized way, while they did have the technology to produce grains, get wild fish, and farm animals in a mechanized way. The double whammy is that as populations grew and the amount of available foraged/small-scale-farmed seaweed per person decreased, seaweed culturally lost relevance and importance in people’s diets. Because Asia industrialized later, they had access to eg plastics and efficient diesel engine boats to make farming seaweed easier. So they could avoid or reduce going through a period where seaweed lost relevance.
- vegardx 3y ago
  Seaweed has been quite extensively used as animal feed in at least Norway, to the point where some of the most known local species have names like kutare (cow kelp), sauetang (sheep seaweed) and grisetang (pigs seaweed), since that's what you used to feed your cows, sheeps and pigs.
- raffraffraff 3y ago
  You're probably mostly right. There was a different type poverty back then. These days owning your own home is a dream, but you can walk into a supermarket and buy things that my father wouldn't have dreamt of as a child. Cooked chickens? Every type of fresh fruit and vegetable from all parts of the globe? A frozen food section? Jesus. Remember that video of Yeltsin in the US supermarket? My father is 96. He grew up in rural Ireland, and his family's lifestyle probably didn't differ much from that of his great grandparents. No cars, electricity, running water, tv, phones. That was "normal". Even the poor families in our part of the world owned their own house and a plot of land. Daily bread was the big issue! Even wealthy locals wouldn't be wasteful with food, and nobody had heard of an avocado. On a daily basis they collected water from a well, chopped wood and collected kindling from around the local woods to keep the stove constantly lit. They milked their own cows, churned butter and cream. He remembers walking the beach with a bucket, collecting periwinkles, and wandering the fields looking for mushrooms when they were in season. He collecting hazelnuts, sloes, damsons and berries from the hedgerow. They kept chickens. They bartered eggs and butter for pork, flour and oats. And yes, they would also go to the local shop to buy tea, sugar, cloth, shoes, materials to repair everything, coal etc. Pots and pans were handed down through generations or given as wedding gifts. Perhaps only a bunch of times every year would they make a trip into the big town to buy clothes and shoes, or replace work out necessities. But even his clothes were sparse, and worn until they practically fell off him. Everything was repaired over and over. I'd say practically none of his calories were imported, pre-cooked or packaged. Today, almost all of it is. Nobody needs to forage to survive any more. When he told me how hard life was back in the first half of the 1900s, he said "We weren't even poor by local standards! My mother was a cook for a wealthy household and knew how to make the most of whatever was available, and she could sew. My father had a good job on the railway, and had an interest in growing vegetables. Plus his extra uniforms (which came with the job as a railway guard) provided good quality material for children's clothes! Other children in my school though we were well off!"
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
RandallBrown 3y ago
> Seaweed is one of those incredibly delicious items[1] that for some strange reason isn't more popular. Seaweed is one of the few foods that will nearly ruin a dish for me. I just really don't like the flavor or the smell.
- Tor3 3y ago
  It's an acquired taste - in other words, you acquire it by exposure. For me, seaweed was something I just accepted but didn't particularly care about when I was first exposed to Japanese food (I will eat everything edible served to me, out of principle), but after all this time I've come to love it and it's now delicious when we use various kinds of seaweed and kelp in soups and lots of other dishes. There's a lot of unknown food which doesn't taste particularly good at first, or it even tastes bad - but people learn to like just about everything, just give it time. It's not a yes / no forever issue.
farnsworth 3y ago
It's just the name. "sea" and "weed" are both unappetizing. Needs a PR firm to rebrand it.
- toyg 3y ago
  It also looks like shit, unless it's heavily prepped.
  - ta8903 3y ago
    So does chocolate?
Freedom2 3y ago
Many, many cuisines outside of Japan incorporate it into their dishes?
pjmlp 3y ago
In Portugal, you can get fish soups and açorda variations (a kind of breadcrumbs soaked in broth and seasoned with olive oil and garlic) based dishes, with seaweeds.

bpicolo 3y ago

> in Italian pasta with seaweed mixed All the rage at Italian/Japanese fusion joints (and honestly in Japan too - Japan loves pasta)

nonethewiser 3y ago
> All the rage at Italian/Japanese fusion joints Im going to take a wild guess and say this is not in Italy.
- gtufano 3y ago
  I'm from Naples, in the south of Italy and, while pasta with seaweed is indeed not existing here (I can't even imagine why you should do that to pasta), fritter with seaweed are common, here --> cfr. https://blog.giallozafferano.it/studentiaifornelli/zeppoline-di-alghe/ https://blog.giallozafferano.it/studentiaifornelli/zeppoline...
  - SSLy 3y ago
    > I can't even imagine why you should do that to pasta it's all about that umami
- bpicolo 3y ago
  Perhaps not, but not such a far cry from squid ink in pasta in terms of intended effect eh

ahzhou 3y ago

It’s incredibly common in every East Asian coastal cuisine. If you live near the coast, you can easily forage your own too.

opportune 3y ago

My mostly-uninformed hypothesis is that seaweed’s relative lack of popularity outside of East Asia stems from the industrialization timeline of Asia vs eg Europe. People in Europe could and did farm seaweed, but with the technology of the mid 19th century it was not possible to do so in a mechanized way, while they did have the technology to produce grains, get wild fish, and farm animals in a mechanized way. The double whammy is that as populations grew and the amount of available foraged/small-scale-farmed seaweed per person decreased, seaweed culturally lost relevance and importance in people’s diets. Because Asia industrialized later, they had access to eg plastics and efficient diesel engine boats to make farming seaweed easier. So they could avoid or reduce going through a period where seaweed lost relevance.

vegardx 3y ago
Seaweed has been quite extensively used as animal feed in at least Norway, to the point where some of the most known local species have names like kutare (cow kelp), sauetang (sheep seaweed) and grisetang (pigs seaweed), since that's what you used to feed your cows, sheeps and pigs.
raffraffraff 3y ago
You're probably mostly right. There was a different type poverty back then. These days owning your own home is a dream, but you can walk into a supermarket and buy things that my father wouldn't have dreamt of as a child. Cooked chickens? Every type of fresh fruit and vegetable from all parts of the globe? A frozen food section? Jesus. Remember that video of Yeltsin in the US supermarket? My father is 96. He grew up in rural Ireland, and his family's lifestyle probably didn't differ much from that of his great grandparents. No cars, electricity, running water, tv, phones. That was "normal". Even the poor families in our part of the world owned their own house and a plot of land. Daily bread was the big issue! Even wealthy locals wouldn't be wasteful with food, and nobody had heard of an avocado. On a daily basis they collected water from a well, chopped wood and collected kindling from around the local woods to keep the stove constantly lit. They milked their own cows, churned butter and cream. He remembers walking the beach with a bucket, collecting periwinkles, and wandering the fields looking for mushrooms when they were in season. He collecting hazelnuts, sloes, damsons and berries from the hedgerow. They kept chickens. They bartered eggs and butter for pork, flour and oats. And yes, they would also go to the local shop to buy tea, sugar, cloth, shoes, materials to repair everything, coal etc. Pots and pans were handed down through generations or given as wedding gifts. Perhaps only a bunch of times every year would they make a trip into the big town to buy clothes and shoes, or replace work out necessities. But even his clothes were sparse, and worn until they practically fell off him. Everything was repaired over and over. I'd say practically none of his calories were imported, pre-cooked or packaged. Today, almost all of it is. Nobody needs to forage to survive any more. When he told me how hard life was back in the first half of the 1900s, he said "We weren't even poor by local standards! My mother was a cook for a wealthy household and knew how to make the most of whatever was available, and she could sew. My father had a good job on the railway, and had an interest in growing vegetables. Plus his extra uniforms (which came with the job as a railway guard) provided good quality material for children's clothes! Other children in my school though we were well off!"

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

RandallBrown 3y ago

> Seaweed is one of those incredibly delicious items[1] that for some strange reason isn't more popular. Seaweed is one of the few foods that will nearly ruin a dish for me. I just really don't like the flavor or the smell.

Tor3 3y ago
It's an acquired taste - in other words, you acquire it by exposure. For me, seaweed was something I just accepted but didn't particularly care about when I was first exposed to Japanese food (I will eat everything edible served to me, out of principle), but after all this time I've come to love it and it's now delicious when we use various kinds of seaweed and kelp in soups and lots of other dishes. There's a lot of unknown food which doesn't taste particularly good at first, or it even tastes bad - but people learn to like just about everything, just give it time. It's not a yes / no forever issue.

farnsworth 3y ago

It's just the name. "sea" and "weed" are both unappetizing. Needs a PR firm to rebrand it.

toyg 3y ago
It also looks like shit, unless it's heavily prepped.
- ta8903 3y ago
  So does chocolate?

Freedom2 3y ago

Many, many cuisines outside of Japan incorporate it into their dishes?

pjmlp 3y ago

In Portugal, you can get fish soups and açorda variations (a kind of breadcrumbs soaked in broth and seasoned with olive oil and garlic) based dishes, with seaweeds.