A Seaweed Revolution in the UK?

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Seaweed farming could be a huge boon for the UK, restoring biodiversity, cleaning the sea and could even be capturing carbon. Seaweed is healthy and delicious but UK grown seaweed has a very low profile with only a handful of farms across the country and few people eating it. In this programme Leyla Kazim finds out why this is and what a future focused on seaweed could look like.

She talks to Vincent Doumeizel author of The Seaweed Revolution who believes seaweed is an answer to many of the crises we face as a species. In St Austell bay, Cornwall she meets Tim van Berkel from the Cornish Seaweed Company and sees one of the few seaweed farms in the UK. What is the current state of Seaweed farming? We hear from Elisa Capuzzo CEFAS. Leyla meets Douglas McMaster at his restaurant Silo to talk about seaweed as an ingredient. She also talks to Olly Hicks, adventurer and seaweed farmer who has a licence for a huge seaweed in Devon but is currently selling the seaweed for use in agriculture.

Produced for BBC Audio in Bristol by Sam Grist

Transcript

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0:00.0	You don't need us to tell you there's a general election coming.
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0:28.4	podcast.
0:29.4	Newscast, listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. Okay, so the guys are just pulling up a rope that is kind of covered in a
0:52.0	That is kind of covered in. Seaweed.
0:54.0	I'm on a farm, but a very different kind of farm to one I would normally be visiting on the food program.
1:02.0	We're out on what feels like open water in St.
1:05.4	Austin Bay in Cornwall to see a pioneering food production method that some people
1:12.0	claim could be the solution to many of the issues we face as a
1:16.0	species.
1:17.0	Wow, so by spring next year, these tiny, tiny miniscoll versions of the full plant will have grown to the
1:28.5	full thing.
1:29.5	Yeah, that's very cool! I'm Lila Kacim. Welcome to the food program. There are a lot of people in a lot of countries working towards a world where farming seaweed becomes a normal part of our food system in the same way that fish or agriculture are.
1:50.0	These people, from farmers to policy makers to chefs to scientists, there aren't that many of them yet, but their numbers are growing and they are optimists. Maybe the chief optimist amongst them is this man.
2:07.9	I'm Vincent de Misell. I'm a food program director at the Lloyd Register Foundation in London.
2:14.4	I'm also Senior Advisor for the United Nations Global Compact and I'm also author of the book,
2:20.0	The Seaweed Revolution.
	...

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