Planting the Future

Saving Our Medicinal Herbs

Rosemary Gladstar, Pamela Hirsch, Rosemary Gladstar, Pamela Hirsch

• Publisher: Healing Arts Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781594775833
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

Voted one of the Top 10 books in 2000 by the Vermont Book Publishers Association. A collective endeavor by United Plant Savers, featuring America's most respected and well-known herbalists. Contributors include Don Babineau, Tim Blakley, Mark Blumenthal, Jane Bothwell, Stephen Harrod Buhner, David Bunting, Richo Cech, Tane Datta, Shatoiya and Rick de la Tour, Ryan Drum, Doug Elliott, Steven Foster, Cascade Anderson Geller, Kate Gilday, Rosemary Gladstar, James Green, Pamela Hirsch, Christopher Hobbs, Sara Katz, Kathi Keville, Robyn Klein, Richard Liebmann, Brigitte Mars, Pam Montgomery, Nancy and Michael Phillips, Janice J. Schofield, Joanne Marie Snow, Deb Soule, Paul Strauss, Gregory L. Tilford, Krista Thie, Susun S. Weed, David Winston, Martin Wall, Matthew Wood. While the renaissance in the U.S. botanical market is positive in many respects, medicinal plant populations are suffering from loss of habitat and overharvesting, and many bestselling herbs are now at risk including echinacea, American ginseng, goldenseal, Hawaiian wild kava, and wild yam. The authors share their extensive experience with using and growing thirty-three of these popular herbs and include suggestions for creating your own private herbal sanctuary--whether a city balcony, suburban backyard, or rural retreat. Full-color photographs will inspire experienced and novice herb users alike to protect and cultivate these remarkable healing plants. Readers will also find out how to use herbal analogues for at-risk plants--other medicinal herbs that provide the same benefits and exist in plentiful amounts--and learn ways to make their herbal purchases a vote for sustainability. Planting the Future shows us how we can participate in the land stewardship, habitat protection, and eco-friendly consumption that will ensure an abundant, renewable supply of medicinal plants for future generations. All author royalties will be used for replanting native medicinal herbs on a 370-acre botanical sanctuary in Ohio.

APPENDIX 1

SEA VEGETABLES

RYAN W. DRUM, PH.D.

Seaweeds—or sea vegetables, as they are also called—are those large macroalgae that any of us who have been to the ocean can see growing on rocks, on the seafloor, and even on each other, in shallow seawater and the intertidal zones. The term “seaweeds,” however, is a bit misleading. With a few notable exceptions, seaweeds are actually saltwater-tolerant, land-dependent plants growing almost exclusively at the narrow interface where land and sea meet. Because they are photosynthetic, unlike the truly “pelagic” seaweeds (able to live and grow at sea, independent of land), such as sargasso weed, most seaweeds must be firmly attached to something to stay in the “photic zone,” where they can receive sufficient sunlight.

This proximity to land has meant that sea vegetables have been consumed regularly by all coastal peoples for a very long time. The worldwide awareness of healthy living has, in the past twenty years, initiated a very deliberate increase in our dietary seaweed consumption, especially in the developed postindustrial nations where voluntary vegetarian and macrobiotic diets have become increasingly popular. Most East Asian populations (those of Japan, Korea, and China) continue to eat large amounts of seaweed per capita, with Japan having the highest per capita dietary sea vegetable consumption.

In the most developed countries, the amount of sea vegetable consumed unknowingly by the average person probably far exceeds that consumed knowingly. This is a result of the widespread use of several phycocolloids (carageenan from the red algae Chondrus crispus, Irish moss, and Gigartina spp., grapestone) as food additives to lend bulk to a number of foods. These phycocolloids enable large amounts of water to be controlled as a semisolid gel, making for an even texture and distribution of flavor and coloring in frozen semidairy confections and for stable, semisolid structure in foods such as ice cream. The brown seaweed extract algin is found in the huge eastern Pacific kelp, Macrocystis spp., harvested by large automated harvesters from square-mile leases off the coasts of California and Mexico. One pound of algin is used to stabilize a ton of ice cream. A careful reading of labels on most food products that require a stable emulsion or suspension of materials, such as ice cream, will usually show carageenan (from red algae) or sodium alginate (from brown algae) listed as an ingredient.

Enormous quantities of raw seaweeds are harvested worldwide to feed a world market increasingly hungry for phycocolloids used in tens of thousands of food products, beauty products, and industrial applications. Large coastal areas have been vacuumed clean of seaweeds with huge suction harvesters. Broad beaches in the eastern Canadian maritime provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have been denuded for several years, and there have been attempts by the harvesters to expand their harvests into Maine. Two major Canadian federal departments, Environment Canada and Fisheries, are trying to halt or at least control such egregious waste of intertidal seaweed stands. Much of the harvest in eastern Canada supports the huge market for dried seaweed meal as a soil and veterinary/agricultural enhancer, and provides an excellent source of minerals for poor soils and malnourished livestock. For instance, the agricultural product Ag Kelp is primarily composed of the brown algae Ascophyllum and Fucus spp., although the exact species composition may vary considerably. In addition to direct soil and animal feed applications, seaweed extracts are sprayed directly onto crop plant leaves to facilitate foliar feeding. Irish moss is also vacuum-harvested; such harvesting is a serious threat to both intertidal and subtidal ecosystems. The bycatch of other seaweeds and fauna is horrific. Another red alga, an agarophyte (produces agar), Gracillaria spp. has been mostly eliminated by aggressive harvesting on several Caribbean islands to support a booming industry for male virility tonic (basically flavored hot water extracts) for both local and export consumption.

From Belize (where I purchased a quantity for personal delights and consumer testing) to the Virgin Islands, “seaweed drink” is popular.

Frankly, what once thrilled me now saddens and worries me: my doctoral work was in phycology, the study of algae. For me, it was a combination of cell biology and ecology. Although I started out in freshwater algae, once I had taught in the algae course at Woods Hole and had gone out collecting (among phycologists, “harvesting” is an extremely perjorative term, unacceptable to serious scholars and friends of the seaweeds) the gorgeous huge marine algae and seaweeds growing on the rocky stretches of the Massachusetts’ coast, I became an instant fan of these exquisite plants. In truth, I was thrilled at their many industrial, medicinal, and culinary uses. Back in 1967 I did not envision the realities of imminent overharvesting.

I left the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to be a visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, where I taught the Marine Botany class, an advanced class on marine algae, large and small. I was totally excited by the lush growths of huge kelps, enormous greens, bountiful reds, and of course my special friends, the diatoms, solitary and colonial unicellular algae living inside fantastically ornamented glass cell walls, all thriving on the rocky shores of California. Within a month of my arrival at UCLA, controls on drilling rig Number 3 offshore from Carpinteria, California, failed and a huge quantity of sticky, black, viscous petroleum began to coat the coast repeatedly as surge after surge of crude oil spewed into the sea and washed ashore on the breakers, killing the entire intertidal zone for hundreds of miles. Not only were the extant seaweeds killed, but the perfect rock surfaces were filled and coated with tar, renedering them unfit for seaweed growth for a year or more. This was not an isolated one-time event; perhaps more than aggressive harvesting, crude oil from shipping disasters and the accepted customary spillage as it is loaded on and off oil tankers is probably the greatest environmental hazard for seaweeds worldwide. Onshore and nearshore pollution from both sewage and industrial wastes also makes large areas unsuitable for further seaweed growth. I have observed steady, and sometimes abrupt, decline in the total area and biomass and species diversity in all three of the coastal locations where I have lived. As a result I believe that there is a great future in pelagic sea vegetable farming with huge floating artificial substrates in the open seas if sufficient capital became available.

WHICH SEAWEEDS ARE EDIBLE?

All seaweeds are edible. Many are unpalatable. Some are very tasty after drying, roasting, or lightly steaming. Most are not very tasty fresh, wet, and alive. Powdered or flaked sea vegetables are often best. For those who are especially resistant, they can be introduced gradually in cooked foods. Real powdered kelp (not rinsed, de-salinized, reconstituted flakes) is a delicious high-potassium salt replacement in most cooked foods and on popcorn.

Nori (several species of the red alga genus Porphyra) is probably the most popular seaweed for eating, both historically and today. Nori was eaten abundantly by native peoples. It is tasty used in soups and, re-wetted, in salads, dried as a snack, toasted lightly in a dry iron skillet, deepfried with cooked, rolled oats as the Celtic laver bread, and used as a food wrap for sushi. It tends to have a sweet, meaty flavor pleasant to most palates. Dulse, another red alga, is another easy-to-eat snack but quite salty and often a little fermented in the marketplace. Its relatively high fatty acid content results in rancidity after a year or more in storage. The large brown “kelps” (kombu, or, Laminaria groend-landica; sugar kelp, or, Laminaria saccharina; wakame, or, Alaria spp.) can be eaten dried but are usually easier to eat when cooked with grains, legumes, or miso soup broth. The bright green dried fronds of the giant bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) are a great snack, salty and high in vitamins and minerals (up to 50 percent dry weight), particularly potassium, protein, and free amino acids. Other brown algae, such as hijiki (Cystceria geminata), sargassum (Sargassum mutica), and sea palm, are usually best cooked with wet food as in soups, miso broth, grains, legumes, vegetable pies, and stews. Sea lettuce (Ulva lactuca and Monostroma spp.) has a strong seafood taste and odor but is easy to eat as a snack or in salads since it is quite delicate after drying and crumbles easily into tiny, tender pieces.

HARVESTING SEAWEEDS

My personal and professional rules for seaweed harvest are very basic: choose the cleanest waters you can find and verify this by talking to locals and calling ecology and health agencies before harvesting sea vegetables. Cut the seaweeds from rocks using stainless steel scissors, leaving the holdfasts and some plant material for regrowth. As Evelyn McConnaughey indicates in Sea Vegetables and Eleanor and John Lewallen state in Sea Vegetable Cookbook and Forager’s Guide, each specific seaweed has its own special harvesting and processing requirements. Harvest only what you will actually be able to process and use. Try harvesting on cloudy cool days at low tide, when the individual plants are not heat- or drying-stressed, which means they will transport better and tend to yield a much tastier product. I try to dry my seaweeds outside in the full sun for four to ten hours in one day. If this is not possible, I dry them inside at 80 to 100 degrees, using wood heat and small fans for air circulation. Place them in airtight opaque containers immediately after they are totally dried.

In proper storage most dried sea vegetables stay nutritionally and medicinally secure indefinitely. The minerals do not degrade; the phycocolloids slowly fragment over years; the pigments slowly fade, especially the chlorophylls; fats slowly become rancid; proteins fragment slowly to polypeptides and amino acids. “Proper storage” ideally means that the sea vegetables are stored in completely airtight and waterproof opaque containers (not paper or plastic bags) at temperatures less than 70 degrees, and in the dark. Do not store dried sea vegetables in a refrigerator or near sources of strong odors; they readily absorb odors and tend to be aggressively hydroscopic (they absorb water from the air), which is why dry storage is essential. Some sea vegetables, such as nori, improve in taste and texture for at least twenty years in dry storage, becoming sweeter as complex carbohydrates fragment to simple sugars, and meatier as proteins fragment to amino acids.

Bladderwrack and sea lettuce are two exceptions to indefinite storage; they seem to easily discolor and develop unsavory tastes and odors if stored for more than a year. In addition, any dried seaweed that has any trace animals hidden in its folds will tend to putrefy with just a small amount of ambient moisture, releasing amines, such as putrecine and cadaverine, not favored by most.

WHEN ARE SEAWEEDS NOT SAFE TO USE FOR FOOD AND MEDICINE?

Although all seaweeds are innately safe to eat, they can become dangerously contaminated where they grow by sewage and industrial, mining, agricultural, and radioactive wastes. Infectious microbes and parasites are usually absent on seaweeds in cold northern waters. In warm tropical seas, cholera is transmissible via topical seaweed contamination by feces from cholerainfected humans. A few seaweed-sourced cholera deaths were reported in the 1990s after the victims ate raw tropical seaweeds in salads.

Palytoxin, the most deadly marine neurotoxin, has killed some seaweed consumers after the seaweeds came in contact with Palythoa sea anemones during harvest in tropical waters. The genus Palythoa does not occur yet in northern waters.

In the mid-1980s, Australia and New Zealand banned importation of dietary sea vegetables from Japan due to unacceptably high contents of lead, cadmium, and arsenic. Japanese products dominate much of the wordwide prepackaged commercial sea vegetable market. These seaweeds could have originated anywhere; the packages sold in North America are labeled “Product of Japan” and do not indicate country or site of origin. Most North American dietary sea vegetable harvesters are very proud of their harvest places and practices (see the list of reliable harvesters at the end of this chapter; they all harvest by hand and in small amounts). In England, radioactive medical waste contaminated laver (nori) used abundantly in laver bread and other dietary seafoods and caused radiation sickness in coastal villagers who consumed those products. The lesson: know your sources!

WHAT NUTRITIONAL BENEFITS CAN SEAWEED PROVIDE?

Iodine is the essential element in most thyroid hormones, natural and synthetic, and is essential for the maintenance of normal mammary gland architecture and saliva composition. No land plants are reliable sources of dietary iodine. Seaweeds, eaten regularly, are the best natural food sources of biomolecular dietary iodine, and, unlike marine animals, do not seem to collect fat-soluble pesticides and industrial wastes such as PCP, PCB, and dioxin.

What exactly does “eaten regularly” imply? To me it means eating 5 to 15 grams of dried seaweeds at least twice a week. An ounce (29 grams) a week is slightly more than 3 pounds a year. My personal consumption is around 10 pounds a year. I usually suggest consuming brown seaweeds and red seaweeds at a 2:1 ratio; roughly 2 pounds of brown algae and 1 pound of red algae. Regular consumption of sea vegetables in the diet encourages resident intestinal microflora to develop enzymes capable of digesting sea vegetables; most of us can so adapt in 4 to 6 weeks. Prolonged or heavy intermittent antibiotic use can severely reduce a human’s seaweed digestive capacity. Just eating sea vegetables is only a beginning; for optimal health effects, one must also digest the sea vegetables and absorb nutrients from them.

DIETARY MINERALS

Sea vegetables are excellent sources of most minerals, especially potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, nitrogen, ir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• What You Can Do to Make a Difference
• Creating Botanical Sanctuaries
• Wise Old Plants
• The American Extra Pharmacopoeia
• Flower Essences
• Arnica
• Black Cohosh
• Bloodroot
• Blue Cohosh
• Calamus Root
• Cascara Sagrada
• Echinacea
• Eyebright
• American Ginseng
• Goldenseal
• Goldthread
• Helonias Root
• Kava
• Lady's Slipper Orchid
• Lobelia
• Lomatium
• Oregon Grape
• Osha
• Partridgeberry
• Pipsissewa
• Pleurisy Root
• Slippery Elm
• Spikenard
• Stoneroot
• Sundew
• Trillium
• Venus's-Flytrap
• Virginia Snakeroot
• White Sage
• Wild Indigo
• American Wild Yam
• Yerba Mansa
• Yerba Santa
• Appendix 1: Sea Vegetables
• Appendix 2: Concern for European Medicinal Plants
• Appendix 3: Planting Guides and Resources
• Footnotes
• Index
• Join United Plant Savers
• About the Authors
• About Inner Traditions
• Copyright