Seaweed: A Sustainable Harvest Finds Resurgence in San Luis Obispo
As he clambered over slippery rocks and waded through tidepools at Estero Bluffs State Park north of Cayucos, Vladimir Coho had a revelation.
"It was like changing a television set from black and white to color. I had previously walked in the ocean and had seen all of the vegetation as an undifferentiated mass of stuff.
"Suddenly stuff that I used to think of as getting in the way of sand … I (now) thought of as edible," explained the Southern California man of how he learned of the long cultural and culinary tradition of foraging seaweed.
Coho is part of a growing number of Central Coast visitors and residents who are reviving the practice of harvesting the ocean's bounty.
San Luis Obispo Business Revives Kelp Harvesting, Farming
"It really is the food of the future," said Kelpful CEO Melissa Hanson, whose small, worker-owned company sustainably harvests wild seaweeds by hand.
"It's much more nutrient-dense than land-based plants because of where and how it grows," she added, containing iodine, calcium, magnesium, selenium, copper, iron and other nutrients. "It's an incredible addition to your diet."
Hanson said she caught "seaweed fever" in 2018 after she heard a podcast about kelp farming.
"It was just absolutely mindblowing," Hanson recalled. "I saw this opportunity to really have an impact on climate change, have an impact on my community and do what I love by feeding people."
She and her partners, Jules Marsh and Austin Rodgers, launched Kelpful in 2020. It currently has eight employees.
Wearing wetsuits, Kelpful workers use scissors to snip kombu, giant kelp and other species off the rocks near Cayucos and San Simeon, harvesting up to 100 pounds at a time. "If you consider the total biomass even in one location, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of what's there," Hanson said.
The seaweeds are then washed and dehydrated at a local farm before being brought to the company's San Luis Obispo warehouse to be toasted and milled.
In addition to dried seaweeds, the company specializes in self-care products including sugar scrubs and bath bombs and culinary products such as its signature Sea Sprinkles, a blend of roasted wild nori, toasted sesame seeds and sea salt. The company is also branching out into "seaweed foraging adventures," where people can experience harvesting their own kelp guided by experts from Kelpful.
Still, Hanson said, "Wild harvesting can only take us so far. There's only so much we can do mindfully, sustainably."
The Morro Bay woman wants to eventually transition into kelp farming, which she described as "the future of our food system."
"Growing seaweed in the ocean uses zero freshwater, zero pesticides. It's a zero impact crop," Hanson explained. Plus, she added, "it "sucks up tons of carbon and nitrogen" from the waves, helping bring the ocean "back into balance."
"It's an immense privilege" to be continuing a tradition that's tied to "the beginning of human history in this area," Hanson said, acknowledging the history of kelp farming and foraging on the Central Coast. "It comes with a huge responsibility."
"This is ancient knowledge" as interpreted by modern foodies and outdoor enthusiasts, explained Spencer Marley, founder of Marley Family Seaweeds in Cayucos, who has been harvesting local seaweed for about 10 years and, like other local foragers, sees his efforts as part of a cultural and culinary tradition millenia in the making.
History of Seaweed Harvesting on California's Central Coast
Seaweed harvesting on the Central Coast goes back as far as 14,000 years, about 2,000 years after people first migrated to modern-day California from the Siberian peninsula and Japanese archipelago, according to Chad Jackson, associate archeologist and tribal liaison for the San Luis Obispo Coast District of California State Parks.
"The first people who settled in the Americas came along this continuous strip of kelp along the whole coast," Jackson explained, and their descendants, the Chumash and Salinan peoples, found food and shelter close to shore. "That habitat has always been the main source of their maritime subsistence."
By studying coastal refuse heaps in San Luis Obispo County, archeologists know that their diet included feather boa kelp, kombu, nori and ulva, also known as sea lettuce, in addition to shellfish, fish and seals, Jackson said.
The evidence? At those sites, researchers found shells indicating "a relatively high abundance of non-dietary gastropods" — tiny sea snails that hitched a ride on the edible algaes tribal members brought back to camp, he explained.
According to State Parks state historian Amy Hart, seaweed also played a key role for the "small but very important community of Chinese immigrants" who migrated south to the Central Coast from the goldfields of northern California. It's a heritage reflected in such regional place names as China Cove and China Point.
In her 1974 book "Where the Highway Ends: A History of Cambria, San Simeon and the Ranchos," Geneva Hamilton writes, the transplants settled at "regular intervals from the Monterey County line south to the mouth of Villa Creek (near Cayucos) near springs on the cliffs and steep hillsides overlooking the wave-washed rocks where the produce of their farms grew...Their crop was seaweed."
In order to encourage sea lettuce to grow, the farmers "made sure the rocks preferred by the ulva were plentiful and strategically placed to receive full benefit of wave and sun." They even used smoldering pine shavings, later replaced by kerosene torches, to burn undesirable algae species.
"Day or night, whenever the tide was low, the men and women, isolated from their neighbors by long stretches of rugged coastline, worked at their trade," Hamilton writes. No machinery was used, and there were no shortcuts. Weed farming required painstaking, hard and often dangerous hand labor."
Once harvested, the seaweed was transported in sacks or bamboo baskets, dried in the sun and shipped to San Francisco and Hong Kong.
According to Hart, the practice lasted about a century, from the 1860s to the 1960s.
"That's when you see property owners start to use their property in a different way," she explained. "This idea of living off the land wasn't so feasible anymore."
Seaweed Foraging Tours Find Audience
While Kelpful is mostly focused on mariculture, Marley Family Seaweeds seeks to offer a foraging experience derived from its founder's hunter-gatherer roots.
"I really do take a lot of pride in the fact that I dug up this practice and made it relevant," he added. "You get out, you explore … It's just invigorating to be part of that whole cycle."
After a career in commercial fishing that included stints running the "rod room" at a Morro Bay sportfishing company, owning a salmon boat and managing the Morro Bay Oyster Farm, Marley got interested in seaweed.
After he witnessed his then-wife buy "some microgreens for $12 for a tiny bundle," he recalled, "I just thought that it would be so cool if I could harvest something from the ocean to sell at farmers market. My motivation was purely capitalistic."
In addition to the generations of Indigenous and Chinese seaweed harvesters who came before him, Marley credits experts including Heidi Herrman, owner of Strong Arm Farm in Santa Rosa, and marine ecologist Laurie McConnico, a biology professor at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, with teaching him about algae.
Marley spent three years selling seaweed locally. Then he "started inviting people to just tag along" on his foraging trips, Marley said, and the tours took off.
For the past five years, Marley, who works in classroom technology at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, has dedicated his spare time to leading seaweed foraging tours at Estero Bluffs. His children, 13-year-old Radden, 14-year-old Hayden and 11-year-old daughter Zohé help out.
Over the course of an hour and a half, Marley teaches tour participants how to identify, harvest and cook "culinarily valuable" species such as nori, grapestone and olive rockweed. (Not everything is meant to be eaten; Turkish towel, as its name implies, can be used as an exfoliating cloth.)
Although Marley sometimes cuts off seaweed blades, known as laminae, with grape shears — being careful to leave most of the stipe, or stem and all of the holdfast root structure behind — he often lets waves do the work.
"You just wait until the ocean knocks (the algae) off the rocks and you collect it from the tidepools," he explained, using handmade nets to scoop up the dislodged seaweed.
Each person is allowed to harvest 10 pounds of seaweed, enough to fill a five-gallon bucket.
Marley ends each tour by making fresh seaweed ramen on a propane stove on the beach.
In addition to the physical experience, Marley said his foraging trips have a spiritual side.
"You take in a breath. You exhale and look around and soak in the fact of what you're doing," he explained. "When you're harvesting seaweed, you're a part of that environment. You're not a separate entity that's just taking stuff. … Some people get (that feeling) from hiking. For me, the harvesting is the vehicle to be present."
How One Family Discovered Seaweed Foraging
Marley's tours have captured the attention of the Los Angeles Times, Lonely Planet and Sunset magazine — and foraging aficionados such as Coho, who works in marketing for a large video game company.
At home in Modjeska Canyon in Orange County, Coho and his family routinely collect black sage, mustard greens, pine needles and other tasty treasures — sometimes assembling simple salads from weeds they find in their garden.
"I feel like the world is actually more edible than we realize," Coho said. "Obviously our ancestors knew that (but) we've lost some knowledge along the way."
After spotting a mention of Marley Family Seaweeds on the Facebook group Foraging California, Coho booked a private tour via Airbnb for himself; his wife, Fiona Ho, and their kids, seven-year-old Miriona and 10-year-old Fivl in March 2021.
"It was a real eye-opening experience," Coho recalled.
His kids loved exploring the tidepools, Coho said, and he and his wife, who grew up eating seaweed in Hong Kong, appreciated learning about a new culinary resource.
When she lived on the coast 10 years ago, "I saw all this seaweed getting washed up on the shores … It just seemed very wasteful," recalled Ho, who's the chief operating officer for an investment firm. "Being Chinese, we always look around and look for useful things."
Now every time the family goes camping on the Central Coast, they spend some time sifting through tidepools for sustenance.
"It's a way of taking the outside in — literally picking up edible things and putting them in our bodies," Coho said.
