On 14 April each year, nori fishermen gather on a hillside overlooking Ariake Bay on Kyushu in southern Japan to pay homage to ‘the Mother of the Sea’. There is a shrine and an altar for votive offerings but this is not a religious rite. The mother in question is Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker, a Lancashire- born algae researcher who, in 1949, discovered the life-cycle of porphyra umbilicalis. Not, perhaps, front-page news in the occident, but this was the key to the cultivation of that dark green papery wrapping around the outside of sushi that is consumed in one form or another in every Japanese household: nori. Kathleen Drew-Baker died in 1956, unaware that her research had laid the foundations for the most valuable aqua-culture industry in the world. Today 10 billion sheets of nori are produced every year in Japan alone.
This is just one of many surprising facts in Professor Ole Mouritsen’s beautifully illustrated guide for the non-specialist to the immense nutritional, medicinal, industrial and environmental properties of seaweed.
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