Vegetable Sea Food

Oriental seaweeds are not found on every U.S. dinner table, but they play a big enough part in U.S. diet so that wartime shortages are critical. So the harvesting of California kelp, which declined after World War I, is booming again. Kelp was formerly used for potash; giant kelp yields 50 lb. of potash per ton. Now seaweeds are wanted for their algin and agar-agar, used in dairy, bakery and confectionery.

Algin is a colloidal material of the sugar family, itself edible, but principally used as an emulsifying agent in salad dressings, chocolate-milk drinks, ice cream, where it serves to stabilize the intimate mixture of oil or solids in water and to give a smooth texture. Buttermilk, cakes, icings, candy and even tooth paste are smoothed by a fraction of 1% of algin. It is extracted from the kelp after drying, pulverizing and alkali treatment. The kelp itself is harvested by giant scissors which cut the growth within three feet of the surface, do not seriously injure the magnificent treelike growth that extends hundreds of feet down to a holdfast attached to the sea bottom.

Agar-agar is a gelatinous protein, essential in hospital laboratories for the culture and identification of bacteria and the testing of serums and antitoxins. Hitherto imported from Japan, it is now produced from another seaweed, only twelve inches high, which grows on the rocky sea bottom along the coast of Southern California.

In Hawaii more than 70 varieties of seaweed are used for food. Japanese seaweed '"plantations" yield up to $300 per acre yearly.* The Tokyo Bay plantations alone employed more than 3,000 workers.

* Popular Japanese seafood recipe: take a slab of amanori (baked, compressed seaweed), spread with boiled rice and strips of meat. Roll like a jelly roll, cut into transverse slices. Garnish with ginger.

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