by Sea Wolf Adventure’s Guide/Naturalist Jenny Hahn
I love foraging for wild food! Eating between tide and forest makes life a delicious journey. Gathering wild food is my passport to wild places. It is a nourishing way to connect with native plants, coastal animals, and people, too.
Photo: Winged kelp (“Alaria”) is the asparagus of the sea. Delicious in soup, seaweed salad and grain dishes. Credit: North Cascade Institute.
Growing up camping in the 1960s, our family roved cross country in our VW microbus to National Parks. Summer adventures often involved foraging. Blueberries in Maine’s Acadia National Park filled our canteens. For breakfast, my dad folded the tart juicy fruits into giant flapjacks. At Yellowstone Lake, fresh-hooked rainbow trout sizzled in a fry pan on his Coleman stove. On Washington’s Olympic Peninsula–where low-tide beaches seemed to stretch forever–my brothers, sister and I took turns digging razor clams. The sleek, fast-footed clams often out-paced our World War II surplus shovel.
Our foraged meals were adventurous, thrifty, and unfussy, like my widowed father. A five-ingredient Razor Clam Chowder “recipe”– inspired by the gas station attendant – included Bacon, clams, potatoes, onion and a can of Evaporated milk (because cream was too expensive). One spoonful of that briny, chewy, gritty, creamy elixir easily packed in oceans of flavor. Childhood camp meals turned me into a forager!
For the past 13-plus years I’ve been balancing a growing family (four wild-forager grandboys), teaching a popular science class (“Wild Food” of course) at Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College, leading foraging and cooking workshops, writing books (you guessed it…on wild food), and enjoying community-based scientific research about seaweed. It’s the most nutritional vegetable on ocean earth!
Nori seaweeds (Porphyra/Pyropia species) are commonly found in southeast Alaska and also farmed worldwide. Nori is, hands down, my favorite wild food! It is also a Traditional Food for many Indigenous people across the Pacific Rim. In Alaska and British Columbia “seaweed camps” are set up by Indigenous communities to gather, dry, and chop the nutritious seaweed blades. Nori prepared in this way tastes like chewy, mineral-rich popcorn. “Indian Popcorn” my seaweed sisters in the Tribes of Washington like to say—or “Black Gold.” Precious and delicious, Nori is scarcer due to climate change and, in some locations, to pollution.
From 2015-2021, I got carried away in graduate research. I was honored to be the lead (the official term is “primary investigator” but I was also a “primary learner”!) in a team of marine scientists, toxicologists, indigenous traditional food teachers, tribal biologists, and graduate students. We designed a study to sample and test common edible seaweeds for contaminants. Our lab partners, including NOAA and UC Davis, also checked the levels of beneficial chemicals such as fucoidan (few-COY-don). This amazing chemical is linked to lower risk for Alzheimer’s, cancer, and diabetes.
Photo: Gathering “Fucus” or “popweed” from a restored beach near an inactive smelter in South Puget Sound.
My shift to doing scientific research was inspired by a question: Is Salish Sea seaweed safe to eat? The Salish Sea is an inland sea spanning between Washington and British Columbia. It includes the Puget Sound, Strait of Juan de Fuca and Strait of Georgia in Canada. Starting in 2010, I was teaching seaweed workshops for Salish Sea Tribal and First Nation communities. Tribal members asked me: “Jennifer, is this seaweed safe to eat…there’s a tanker going by!”
The Strait where we gathered nori, sea lettuce, wing kelp, bull kelp, dulse and Fucus for food and medicine, was not the same coast their ancestors gathered at for 1000s of years. A century and a half of heavy industry had left its mark. So called “Legacy Chemicals” such as PCBs (from WWII transformers), PAHs (from our fossil fuel burning cars, buses, and trucks), DDT, and thousands of other chemicals had since oozed into estuaries and oceans. These pollutants oozed into sediments and sea water. Were they here–where we cut seaweed for food and medicine? If so, how much seaweed was safe to eat? After receiving a generous $85,000 grant from the SeaDoc Society, my new mission was clear. Find an answer to the question. It truly felt like an opportunity to give back.
Photo: Jenny sampling edible seaweed near a lighthouse to test for contaminants.
From 2015-2021, I got carried away in graduate school research. I was honored to be the lead (the official term is “primary investigator” but I was also a “primary learner”!) in a team of marine scientists, toxicologists, indigenous traditional food teachers, tribal biologists, and graduate students. We designed a study to sample and test common edible seaweeds for contaminants. Eighteen Salish Sea tribes and First Nations communities provided boats and willing hands. Move over, we had built trust for many years during the seaweed workshops. They generously gave me permission to gather on their beaches in Washington and British Columbia.
Edible seaweed samples cut from 45 beaches were delivered to our lab partners, including NOAA and UC Davis. They screen the seaweeds for over 160 problematic chemicals! We also checked the levels of beneficial chemicals such as fucoidan (few-COY-don). This amazing chemical is linked to lower risk for Alzheimer’s, cancer, and diabetes.
The research results were shared first with the Tribes and First Nations. I learned from my indigenous scientist friends, this is the respectful way for a non-Native to do research in Indian Country. After sharing the results with Tribal Councils, First Nation Chiefs and Councils, they were published with “open access” (aka “free to the public”) in an international scientific journal, PLOS One: Chemical contaminant levels in edible seaweeds of the Salish Sea and implications for their consumption.
Photo: Chopping heaps of seaweed samples for lab testing.
If you crave a spoiler: Yes, you can eat a small handful of dried seaweed a day from many but not all beaches in the Salish Sea and stay within the EPA’s guidelines, for some of the chemicals. We screened our seaweed samples for over 130 chemicals. The European Chemicals agency says over 144,000 human-made chemicals exist. The US Department of Health figures about 2000 new chemicals are being released each year. Amazingly, most of the chemicals found in our farmed or foraged foods have no human health-based screening levels. That was a real eye-opener.
My secret release valve for this intense toxicology research and book writing work is SEA WOLF! That’s right. I jump web-feet-first into my favorite work of all–crewing aboard the beautiful M.V. Sea Wolf. As a northwest naturalist and guide, I couldn’t be better placed in my happy zone—the intertidal zone and spruce-hemlock forests! I’ll be aboard again this year–mid-August to September. I can hardly wait! In the meantime, here is another spoiler—a recipe in my new book, PACIFIC HARVEST: A Northwest Coast Foraging Guide (Mountaineers Books, Seattle) out April 1, 2025. More on this in my next post!
