Last August, my wife, Alison, and I drove up the rural and rugged coastline of northern Maine in search of seaweed. Alison had been learning about the benefits of eating seaweed to treat her Hashimoto’s syndrome, an auto-immune disorder that affects her thyroid. Seaweed is iodine and mineral –rich, hailed for its incredible ability to sponge up toxins from the bloodstream. But it will just as easily absorb toxins from the water in which it grows, so we needed to find seaweed from unpolluted waters.
Researching clean water sources, we learned that some of the world’s cleanest is off the coast of Maine. We also found a video of Larch Hanson, a seaweed forager in a small town called Steuben, waxing philosophical about the ocean. Not long after, we were pulling up to a handmade wooden home in a clearing of dense, mossy forest surrounded by yurts, a meditation tower, and yoga platforms. It looked like something out of Shelter magazine. This must be the place, we thought.
Larch’s harvest season goes something like this: He is up and in a wetsuit by 4 a.m. He walks through the woods to a small, private cove situated on the Gouldsboro Bay. A small motorboat takes him—and his handmade rowboat—to the kelp beds about an hour away. To harvest, he uses the rowboat to reach the turbulent waters between the rocks, where the seaweed thrives. He hangs off the boat, gathering piles of seaweed with the moxie of a man decades younger than 70. By 8 a.m., he brings his haul to his drying sheds, where it is air-dried in a climate-controlled environment. The air in the shed is warm, sweet, and briny. Outside, the vegetable garden is composted with seaweed.
The Gulf of Maine is exceptional for seaweed harvesting because it’s an enclosed ecosystem, safe from the pollutants traveling throughout the Atlantic. Seventy percent of the Gulf is bordered by the mainland and 30 percent is bordered by underwater mountain ranges 200 miles offshore. The species of seaweeds that flourish in these waters are diverse and delicious. Digitata is the Atlantic’s version of kombu, nutrient dense with the highest amounts of iodine. There’s natural sugar and glutamic acid that imparts an umami-rich flavor, ideal for a soup or dashi. Alaria is the New England cousin of wakame, a delicate sea vegetable that is the backbone of miso soup and delicious when cooked with grains or beans. Dulse, nori, and kelp also grow here, each with their own culinary application and health benefits. All of these seaweeds, especially digitata, thrive in turbulent waters, which makes trying to farm them a less-than-ideal endeavor with less-than-ideal results.
So Larch forages. He came to this part of downeast Maine on a motorcycle in 1970. He’d been swimming in the Gulf of Mexico for a few years, reading Euell Gibbons‘s book Stalking the Blue Eyed Scallop and learning about foraging in the ocean.
“I was looking for a place that had a good night sky and good water,” he tells me. “I wanted air that went deep into my lungs, deeper than any place I’d ever lived, and finally I got to that place.”
