Future food sources are literally
crawling around us and washing up on our shores every day. Sure, seagrasses,
seaweeds, sea vegetables, eels, and insects are not top-of-the-menu items for
most of us, but they are abundant, rich in nutrients, and increasingly prepared
in delicious ways. I’ve had all manner of sea creatures and insects –
grasshoppers in Houston, ants in Bogotá, sea anemone in Shanghai, and eels in Tokyo, for example –
but those are the curiosities of a first-world eater. We’re talking here about
the potential to feed millions of people higher-nutrient food than most U.S. processed
products. Of course, the questions are always ones of taste and costs. The low-quality,
unhealthy, packaged, middle-aisle goods in U.S. grocery stores are designed to
be addictively tasty and inexpensive.
In this spirit, Michelin-Star Chef Ángel León and his R&D team at restaurant Aponiente in Spain's Andalucía are doing groundbreaking work - some call it revolutionary – in cultivating eelgrass. This form of seagrass contains clusters of small, edible grains Time Magazine and others refer to as a new type of rice. In tasting a boiled version of this new “rice,” Time’s Matt Goulding wrote several years ago that “the first thing you notice is the texture: Taut-skinned and compact, each grain pops on your tongue like an orb of caviar. It tasted like the love child of rice and quinoa with a gentle saline undertow.” In other words, eelgrass rice shows great potential as a tasty and easily prepared food source.
Chef León is cultivating and domesticating eelgrass in increasing large quantities, determined as he is to see it as an accessible and sustainable source of food and nourishment in a world that sorely needs it. No wonder the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization named this “Chef of the Sea” a 2023 “Food Hero.”
Image
courtesy of Thinking Heads