Smith threaded his boat through the Thimbles, a collection of tiny private islands, some big enough for only a single house. It was low tide. An osprey sat on top of a long stick that served as a mooring. We passed the rusty barge where Smith proposed to his wife, Tamanna Rahman, a graduate student in nursing at Yale, last year. Smith and Blaney talked shop: to anchor the buoys, Smith recommended mafia blocks and mushrooms; Blaney, a diver, thought he might secure them with giant screws. When they got out to the farm, Smith stopped the boat and, using a hook, hauled up a line of kelp. He explained the process of thinning out the growth. “It’s just like, you know, farming,” he said, abashed before a man who had spent his career chasing monsters. “The smaller ones we sell as baby leaf kelp—it’s real thin, sort of translucent, and has a subtler, slightly sweeter base.”
“I’ve got a lot of fishermen looking at me like, You’re gonna do what?” Blaney said. “The other day in the coffee shop, someone referred to me as Captain Kelp, and I’m thinking, I don’t think I like that.” But, he said, with the warmer water driving lobsters from southern New England and the glory days of fish-hunting over, some of his skeptical colleagues might be persuaded to follow him. (Two-thirds of Rhode Island’s commercial lobstermen have left the business in the past decade.) He had credibility, he said, by virtue of still being alive after decades at sea. “Kelp noodles—it’s an economical and clean way to produce good protein,” he said. “What’s the problem?”
Blaney pulled off a piece of kelp and bit into it. To most fishermen, seaweed is a net-fouler, inimical. He chewed thoughtfully. “I know this old captain who used to say, ‘Now we’re going to shake weed till our heads fall off,’ ” he said.
Smith said, “It might be better than the fish in the net.”
In kelp, Smith has found what he calls “ecological redemption.” He was born in 1972 in Newfoundland, where his American parents had gone during the Vietnam War. His father, a linguist, wrote one of the first contemporary Inuttut dictionaries. His mother, who graduated from the Sorbonne, raised him and his sister and later became the managing editor of the French-textbook division at Houghton Mifflin. When Smith was in grade school, the family moved to Massachusetts; his parents divorced, and Smith, then fourteen, dropped out of school and moved in with his girlfriend and her mother in Section 8 housing. He worked as an emergency-room janitor on the night shift at a hospital, dabbled in selling acid and cocaine, and hung out on the docks with Hell’s Angels. “Bren was a tough kid who could take care of himself,” Sylvia Madrigal, his mother’s partner, wrote to me in an e-mail. (His mother died in December.) “The more dangerous the task, the better.” Talking up his “Newfie” roots, Smith found it easy to get work on boats. He started on a lobster boat out of Lynn, up the coast from Boston. It went out every day at 3:30 A.M. and returned at 5 P.M., after which he’d bring lobsters to his mother’s office and sell them at a markup.
At seventeen, Smith says, he went to Alaska, where he fished for cod in the Bering Sea and in illegal waters off the coast of Russia; the cod went to McDonald’s. “We were throwing millions of pounds of bycatch over because we only had permits for a couple of kinds of fish,” he told me. “It was like a sea of death around the boat. I’m not an environmentalist”—he considers conservation alone to be an inadequate response to climate change, and insensitive to people’s need to eat and work—“but I loved the sea, and wanted to spend my whole life working at sea. It was just clearly not sustainable.” When the cod stocks crashed and Newfoundland’s job market went with them, Smith saw it as the beginning of the end of wild fish. He returned to Newfoundland to try aquaculture, which promised both a solution to a food problem and a familiar way of life, but he was quickly disillusioned. “It was Iowa pig farming at sea,” he said.
Between fishing gigs, Smith finished high school and enrolled at the University of Vermont; he graduated in 1996 with a degree in English and religion. By 2000, he was living in an Airstream in the woods near New Haven, trying to feed himself by growing fish from pet-store stock in plastic tubs. One day, he read in the paper that some of the historic shelling leases near the Thimble Islands—so-called king’s grants, which had gone fallow after an oyster die-off in the nineties—would be made available. He got one, for fifty dollars an acre, and dropped some oyster cages on the seabed. During the next decade, he built a business, Thimble Island Oyster Company, around the allure of artisanally produced, eco-friendly filter feeders from an idyllic spot. He added clams, scallops, and mussels, and started a community-supported fishery program, with subscription customers.
Then came the one-two punch of Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, with storm surges that buried his entire crop in three feet of mud. He lost years’ worth of produce and half his gear, and nearly drowned trying to recover the rest. “I decided that this was the new normal—I was going to exist in extreme weather and changing water temperatures,” he said. “I started searching around for different species to grow and different ways of growing them.” He pulled the lantern nets off the seafloor and hung them in the water column so they could swing in a storm and not get swamped. He drew a line around the farm: he would grow only species, like his filter feeders, that were delicious and restorative.
That is how he found kelp. Charles Yarish, a leading seaweed expert at the University of Connecticut who has successfully manipulated the life cycle of sugar kelp and studies its bioextractive capabilities, agreed to breed the plants in his lab. Yarish’s lab is a library of species, a series of chilly walk-ins with brightly lit shelves of flasks holding acid-green tendrils, mossy puffballs, scab-red tufts. Smith picks up the seedlings, on thin twine wrapped around PVC pipe, and unspools them on his underwater lines when the water temperature drops into the low fifties, usually by late fall. There could come a day when the water in the Sound is too warm for kelp to thrive; Smith will adjust. “It wasn’t just adding another species,” he told me. “It was the beginning of adding another ten thousand species.”
One afternoon, Smith invited me to the house that he and Rahman recently bought in Fairhaven, a neighborhood of New Haven that was once known as Clam Town, back when it was the nexus of the booming East Coast oyster trade. The house, a Victorian Gothic overlooking the river, was built in 1875 by an oyster kingpin; there is a shucking room in the basement, and Smith and Rahman still find shells in their garden. Smith took off his boots on the back porch before entering the kitchen, where Rahman was cleaning mussels at the sink. Her family is from Bangladesh; she grew up in L.A.’s Koreatown, eating the kinds of things that Smith pulls off his nets. She met Smith at a dinner party thrown by one of his customers. “Bren tried to woo me with his clams,” she said. “I made this amazing Thai dish and then an hour later broke out in hives. It was my first allergic reaction.” They have EpiPens placed strategically around their house.
Soon it was time to eat, at a table laden with seaweed and its cohabitants. There were bright-green flakes of roasted sea lettuce on cucumber, seasoned with salt that Smith harvests from the farm. The butter was flecked with yellow-green chunks of kelp, like the terrazzo floor in an old bank. Rahman found a tiny slipper shell in her mussels; Smith told her she could eat it, a bonus delicacy. The main course was fra diavolo, but instead of linguine it was made with kelp noodles. It tasted fresh and briny, like the breath in your nose on a windy day at the beach. “There’s a learning curve with it,” Rahman said delicately. She is the foodie of the family, but it was clear that she still had her doubts.
“We’re picking one of the toughest food types to convince Americans to eat,” Smith said. “But we have no choice.” In his opinion, there is nothing inherently delicious about kale, so bitter, tough, and leathery; we learned to love the stuff because Gwyneth Paltrow told us to and Dan Barber gave us recipes. But, much as kale needed Barber and his ilk to turn it from a T-bone garnish into a way of life, kelp will need a chef to make us desire it.
Seaweed is the unlovely name for marine macroalgae, an enormous, varied family of more than ten thousand species. Most are benthic: they attach to rocks, seabed, or other seaweeds with a clamplike structure called a holdfast. They come in brown, red, and green; some iridesce. Mating, they use eyespots, release pheromones, or extrude slime. Certain species can reproduce vegetatively. They can come equipped with floats so that their leaves—called blades—stay close enough to the surface to photosynthesize. Instead of rigid cell walls like those found in land plants, seaweeds’ cell walls are rich in sugars to help them bend rather than break in swells. These sugars—known as alginates, carrageenans, and agars—thicken, bind, and emulsify toothpaste, shampoo, skin cream, and countless industrial foods, including most ice cream.
The ocean covers seventy per cent of the earth and produces less than two per cent of our food. To grow the rest, we use almost forty per cent of the world’s land and nearly three-quarters of our fresh water. “We haven’t begun to explore the ocean as a food source,” Mike Rust, an aquaculture scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. “If you want a glimpse of the future, the best one is Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ ”—where Captain Nemo feeds his crew exclusively on food harvested from the ocean. Nearly half the world’s ocean-farmed product is seaweed. Most of the industry, which is worth some six billion dollars, is in Asia, where seaweed has long been welcome on the plate. “If you were to extrapolate one of those Asian seaweed farms, it becomes incredible pretty quickly,” Rust said. “You get speculative numbers, like, you could replace all agriculture with less than one per cent of the oceans’ surface area.”
Seaweed can be rich in protein, Vitamin B12, and trace minerals. Iodine and omega-3 fatty acids, which many seaweeds have in abundance, are essential for brain development; some researchers believe seaweed may have played a role in the rise of Homo sapiens. Archeologists have posited a “kelp highway,” to describe the coastal migration of the early Americans, some fourteen thousand years ago. Among modern Westerners, it has largely been treated as the food of last resort, a hedge against starvation that lingers nostalgically in corners of authentic cooking after the crisis wanes. An exception to this is purple laver (nori, in Japan), which the Welsh make into cakes and cook in bacon fat, and which the British food writer Jane Grigson said is “the one seaweed we can decently count in English or Welsh cooking as a vegetable.” Now that our brains are big enough to have devised a million ways to eat too much, seaweed could come to the rescue again. A recent study from the University of Newcastle found that the alginates in brown seaweed may inhibit the uptake of fat. Jamie Oliver, the British chef, recently lost almost thirty pounds and attributed it to seaweed, and to drinking only on weekends.
