People in Europe Ate Seaweed for Thousands of Years Before It Disappeared From Their Diets

Seaweed isn’t something that generally features today in European recipe books, even though it is widely eaten in Asia.
December 1, 2023 by Sustainability Times

Seaweed isn’t something that generally features today in European recipe books, even though it is widely eaten in Asia. But our team has discovered molecular evidence that shows this wasn’t always the case. People in Europe ate seaweed and freshwater aquatic plants from the Stone Age right up until the Middle Ages before it disappeared from our plates.

Our evidence came from skeletal remains, namely the calculus (hardened dental plaque) that built up around the teeth of these people when they were alive. Many centuries later, this calculus still contains molecules that record the food that people ingested.

We analysed the calculus from 74 skeletal remains from 28 archaeological sites across Europe. The sites span a period of several thousand years starting in the Mesolithic, when people hunted and gathered their food, through to the earliest farming societies (a stage called the Neolithic) all the way up to the Middle Ages.

Our results suggest that seaweed was a habitual part of the diet for the time periods we studied, and became a marginal food only relatively recently.

Unsurprisingly, most of the sites where we detected the consumption of seaweed are coastal. But we also found evidence from inland sites that people were ingesting freshwater aquatic plants, including lilies and pondweed. We also found an example of people consuming sea kale.

More:
https://goodmenproject.com/environment-2/people-in-europe-ate-seaweed-for-thousands-of-years-before-it-disappeared-from-their-diets/