Seaweed and Man

Despite an Asian aquaculture tradition of many centuries, aquatic farming on the global scale is still a young sector of food production that has grown rapidly in the last 50 years. Seaweeds, a colloquial but widely used term for macroalgae, play an important role in this business which remains a growing, vibrant, and important production sector for healthy human food. As archaeological investigations in Chile testified, seaweeds have been used by humans for about 14,000 years (Dillehay et al. 2008). According to earliest written records, they were consumed in Japan during the Asukaand Nara Era approx. 1,500 years ago. Even food products directly made from seaweeds have a long