Spirulina: Protein for the Future

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A while back, MOTHER-reader David Lampe wrote us about an amazing form of blue-green algae being grown for human food... and—in the months since we recieved his report—we've heard so many other good things about the unusual delicacy that we decided to look into the matter ourselves.

The idea of eating seaweed has—for a long time now—been included among the standard jokes referring to natural food "fanatics" who'll consume almost anything (no matter how unpalatable it may be) in pursuit of glowing health.

Recent developments, however, indicate that the jest may soon turn on its tellers! The fact is that algae could well become an increasingly familiar part of everyone's diet, as the soaring costs of producing and transporting "traditional" foodstuffs force people to look for alternative sources of nutrition. And—among the many "future foods" now being investigated—single-celled marine plants stand out as potential sources of protein that are both easy and inexpensive to cultivate, highly productive, and amazingly nutritious.

Scientists began to investigate the notion of using algae as food in the 1950's and 60's, but most early research involved only the green varieties Chlorella and Scenedesmus. Unfortunately, such types presented problems in the areas of growth, harvesting, and digestibility ... so their culture was gradually abandoned in favor of another, less troublesome species.

That variety—the probable algal superstar of the 80's—is Spirulina platensis, blue-green algae which have long been part of the diets of human beings. (The microscopic plants were eaten by the Aztecs in pre-Columbian Mexico and are consumed today by healthy Africans living on the shores of Lake Chad.) Even though Spirulina —which is composed of strings of tiny single cells, attached end-to-end to form a spiral shape—is especially well adapted to natural alkaline lakes in arid climates, its growth is no longer limited to such areas. In fact, research teams in several parts of the world are now cultivating the little water organisms in closed pond systems ... often on marginal land that would be total ly unsuitable for most kinds of conventional agriculture.

A NUTRITIONAL GOLD MINE

According to many theories, the bluegreen algae were among the first forms of plant life to appear on the earth some billions of years ago... and they're about the simplest to produce, most nutritious food source we could ever hope to find. Among the many varieties of such primitive plants, Spirulina scores incredibly high on a nutritional scale: It's rich in vitamins A and E, and the B-complex (in fact, this species is the highest nonanimal source of B-12, a vitamin that's often difficult to obtain in a vegetarian diet), and has an impressive array of trace minerals.

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