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Then there's Manuel Bernier in Spain, who wrote of splashing around in Spanish seas, awed at the lush sea vegetables going ignored there; ignored, that is, as the delicious, nutritious, healing food-forms some sea vegetables are. Over here we're going into our eighteenth harvest season. Eighteen, in the Jewish counting, signifies "life" and is a lucky number. I know even less about Judaism than I do about seaweed, if possible. But it does feel good to have Shanti and Loren, Eleanor and Rebecca, and all of our friends to help.

Since writing I have seen that professional herbalists, and people into herbal therapy and nutrition, are picking up on marine algae broad and deep. Big-time professional chefs are doing seminars and even promoting sea vegetables as gourmet, healthful food; but they must be ordering their stuff from somebody else, if in fact they really are offering sea vegetable cuisine to their customers.

My own personal mystical belief is that sea vegetables are entering the human community as a highly respected food as an act of God's love for humanity. I'm very interested in linking up with sea vegetable people worldwide, so drop us an e!

So far, the most controversial part of the book is information supplied by Sherry A. Rogers, M.D., that dried sea vegetables are a major source of vitamin B12 for people. One reader showed us that the B12 content numbers in our book were mistakenly exaggerated by a factor of ten. After reviewing a lot of contradictory information and opinion about B12 and sea vegetables, I have concluded that sea vegetables are a possible, but not reliable, source of B12 for humans.

Sea vegetables in general have a wide range of assimilable vitamins, minerals and trace elements. The nutritional characteristics of any piece of dried marine algae will be affected by when and where it was harvested, how old it is, whether or not it was rinsed, etc. As reported by Dr. Kasutosi Nisizawa, Japanese researchers found fresh or sun-dried sea vegetables full of vitamins, but processed wakame devoid of vitamins. Often I tell people that it is difficult to generalize about sea vegetables, because they are as diverse as land vegetables.

I've never found any U.S. college or university doing any nutritional research whatever on sea vegetables. Have you? I'm trying to introduce sea vegetables as a food that will be studied and accepted by the U.S. academic community. Any ideas?

John Lewallen

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