Clad in a wool skirt and wellies, Marie Power carefully picks her way out the stony spit at Kilfarrasy Beach on Waterford ’s Copper Coast. It is extreme low tide and she moves like a shorebird, quickly but surely stepping from rock pool to rock pool. From time to time, she bends low to get a closer look. Every once in a while, she pulls out what looks like a small pair of sewing scissors and carefully snips a few small leaves of reddish-brown seaweed.
It is a role Power came to almost accidentally. She certainly never anticipated it when she was growing up. Raised on a family farm in the townland of Islandtarsney, near Fenor, not far from the beach at Kilfarrasy, she was fed seaweed by her mother. But because it was strong tasting and treated as folk medicine, she turned her back on it.
“It was salty, it was fishy, it was all those things Irish people are not crazy about. In fact, Irish people are not crazy about anything that comes from the sea, in general, I would have to say. Leading foraging picnics as part of World Oceans Day persuaded her that maybe it was time to rethink. Combined with a search for nutritional ways to supplement her vegetarian diet, seaweed once again entered her life. “I was trying to find ways to get nutrition without it coming from an animal and seaweed is just packed with protein,” Power says. “I thought oh my God, Paddy was right all along and so were uncle Jackie and aunt Eiley back when they were shovelling this stuff into us.
Power’s first venture into the product world was a protein bar she developed to feed her very active son. “He was doing lots of sports and was eating these protein bars. But when I looked at them, they were just disgraceful! Just a lot of chemicals with a chocolate coating. So I told him I’d make him some. And I’d figured out that if I milled the seaweed really fine and made it really small, my kids wouldn’t notice.
Though Power is content keeping her own business small and easily manageable, she has little doubt that Irish seaweed is ripe for rediscovery.
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