From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You are listening to Herb Mentor Radio on Herb Mentor.com. I'm John Gallagher. My guest today is doctor Ryan Drum. Ryan's a practicing community supported medical herbalist, herbal educator, and medicinal herb WildCrafter. He taught botany for years at the university level, has written many scientific papers and peer reviewed journals, and now teaches at major conferences and herb schools.
Ryan specializes in seaweed therapies, thyroid issues, and men's health. He lives on a small remote island where he wildcrafts some of the best sea vegetables and Pacific Northwest herbs you can find. And you can visit him at RyanDrum.com. Ryan, welcome.
Oh, thank you. It's great to be on board, John.
So you're out on, Waldron Island in the San Juans, correct?
Or Oh, it's true.
I or is that not supposed to give away your coordinates?
Oh, no. That's just fine. It's so hard to get here.
It's easy to to encourage people to try.
Well well, how do you get to your island where you live? I mean, do you have to, like, you know, charter a boat or is there a ferry?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have to charter a boat. There is no ferry. There's no public transportation.
It's either your own boat or charter a boat, or you can charter a plane. It's about a hundred and twenty to a hundred fifty bucks each way. Wow. A bit pricey.
So you you don't leave very often?
No. I don't.
So when I saw you last year in, in Massachusetts, that was, like, the big event. Was that, like, alright.
You're leaving for the, you know For that month?
Yeah. That was my my trip for the month of June. I usually get off about once a month, but not always. Mhmm. Especially in the winter, it's not always safe to leave, John.
Pretty scary out there, so why risk my life to go get groceries?
Exactly. Especially when you can harvest your own from the sea.
Exactly.
So you, you built your own cabin there, like, thirty years ago your your website says?
Yeah. Yeah. I did. It it started in nineteen seventy five and moved in in September, the autumn Equinox Mhmm. September twenty first of nineteen seventy six. It wasn't exactly complete, but it was better than continuing to live or sleep out in the in the brush hut that we had developed Wow. Which was a little rough.
Wow. I'm amazed you got, cells cell reception there.
Well, that's one of the nice things about being on top. I'm on the very top of Waldron, the only person that lives on the top now. And I can see the cell phone towers. Let me make sure they're still there. Yep. They're still over there on Mount Constitution.
About, I guess, it's pretty close to twenty miles away.
But you're right. Other places on the island, there is no cell phone service, especially for people who are in the shadow of the the little mountain here on Waldron. And so we have a a place down by Mayo Bay called the Phone Booth, and it's where people drive to get line of sight to Bellingham and Orcas Island.
Wow.
No no commercial establishment there yet. Some people thought about putting up a little coffee stand or maybe sell some eggs and vegetables, but not yet.
And and so just you you have, how do you generate your power there? Are you on solar or what?
Oh, I pray for sunshine. You're right. Uh-huh. And so I've I've got, excuse me, I've got solar panels which are underneath it's about I've got about ninety two percent through transmission of sunlight through special polycarbonate roofing so that panels won't be blown away in in big wind.
Or originally, it was so our kids wouldn't break them with rocks or baseballs or whatever else they were throwing around.
And it also keeps them clean.
Oh. Because and they're, like, say, on a third floor roof, which would be a bother to continue to clean all the time. And then I have a big battery bank. The largest batteries I could carry are the, I think, l sixteens. They weigh about a hundred and thirty five pounds each, about the same as me.
I I guess I'm worth worth about one good battery Oh, wow.
If you put me on the scale.
Yeah. He weighs a battery. Okay. We're gonna charge him a battery's worth. And so in the winter, I ration the electrical use. Electrical use is mostly for lights to read and clutter around the house and media.
And the phone the phone works off of its own battery, and then I I recharge that from the twelve volt system as you would from a car. Right. Although the house doesn't go anywhere. It's just right. That That would be pretty funny, but I don't even wanna think about that.
You say you raised you raised your kids there too, you said?
Yep.
Wow.
And then You have three kids.
Wow. They all went to the Waldron School, which is a little one room schoolhouse.
I think there are about twelve kids in school now. And it goes k through eight. And then if they wanna go to high school, they need to either do homeschooling or leave the island. So all three, my children went off island, my daughter, to live with their mom in Southern California, and our sons went to a a private high school, the urban school in San Francisco. So they went from almost absolute wilderness living to right in the middle of San Francisco going to prep school. It was a bit of a shock for all of us, but but they got a fantastic education in in both places.
Wow. Wow.
And yeah.
That's so when you went out there, you you just, you know, you settled on this place and I'm sure it even seems more remote in nineteen seventy five in a way than it does now, I guess.
You know, because You would think that, wouldn't you?
Over time.
Well, you I guess maybe because of sand so it still kinda feels the the same there too because I'm I'm just thinking, you know, the San Juans have in general and ferries and more ferries in the distance and, but it still feels the same where you are, Right.
Well, we never had a ferry Mhmm.
And there's no safe moorage on the island, which is one of the reasons why it's remained kind of underdeveloped.
Mhmm. And that there's no infrastructure. There are a couple of dirt roads at school, the dock and the post office, and that's that's about it. There are no churches here. Mhmm. I think some one of the neighbors said it was the largest population with no religious structure.
Wow. Alright.
And with no no nothing.
Oh, I love that.
And and the funny thing is that thirty five years ago, it was possible to fly out here for five dollars each way from Bellingham, and so it seemed really close.
I was I was working at Western Washington University over there as a professor, and I could just call up the airline and San Juan Air and, well, wanna go out to the island, and they go, get out at the airport in about an hour, and we'll fly you out there.
However, since there was no phone and there were no reliable radios out here, getting off the island was a little bit more difficult.
In fact Wow.
They might stop or they might not depending on how foggy it was or too windy. Mhmm. And the airstrip was an old pasture which went from the edge of the water, and then there was a fence to keep the sheep from drowning, I guess.
This plains had to clear, and then it went uphill, and it was a short strip, which meant that they landed always going uphill, so they slowed down before they ran into the woods. And they took off going downhill to make sure they cleared the fencing, got up in the air before they hit the water. It was pretty scary if you opened your eyes. It was, oh, no.
And and there was an old barn. The old barn's still there and still got old hay in it. So if they couldn't pick you up, you just stay in the barn until a plane came by. And some people would stash little bits of food there underneath the hay or books. We never quite got a a lending library going. Mhmm.
Pretty interesting way to travel.
Wow. And for those listening who don't know exactly where the heck it is we're talking about, if you can imagine Washington state, the San Juan Islands, where Waldron Island is, is right is off the coast on the northwest part of the northwest part of Washington State.
So Yeah. Just imagine that right in the Puget Sound there.
Not too far from where the Olympics just were, actually. Right?
It's it's true. Fifty four miles, you know, due north. Yeah.
Cool.
So, you know, Ryan, did did, did the, did the the seaweeds, the sea vegetables have anything to do with drawing you out to where you are? Did you discover did discover them really once you've decided to to live out there?
The the San Juan Islands themselves have attracted me or attracted me from my first visit here in nineteen sixty seven when I was visiting some colleagues over at the Friday Harbor Marine Labs.
And then when let's see. I left UCLA be in part because of the oil spill, the Carpentaria rig number three off of Santa Barbara and and just north of Los Angeles completely coated the coast for almost a hundred miles, and I've gone to UCLA from University of Massachusetts in part because of the incredible seaweed populations on that wonderful rocky coast from, what, Baja all the way north into Mendocino.
And I thought this is perfect, the perfect study area, but then when I got paved over with this thick black petroleum Oh.
Oh my gosh. So when an opportunity came to go to Bellingham and I came up and visited, look at all that seaweed. And so it was the it's an entire Pacific Northwest area from, I I suppose, Oregon Oregon north to Alaska, although I wasn't interested in going to Alaska. And so the the seaweeds had already got me here.
And Waldron Island was just one of those flukes. I was whining about not being able to find the perfect homestead place. I looked in every state except Alaska and Hawaii for the perfect place, and so go out and visit this little island and a bunch of people were thinking about buying a big piece of property and giving it up. And I said, oh, alright.
And and at first, it was terrible. I'm so used to town life and all the fun things that are associated with the university town in Bellingham. Right. No no church, no bar, no stores, no anything. Oh my gosh. What a desolate, horrible place, and it was rainy and foggy, and the plane was late, and and my significant other at the time said, what are we doing out here? What a dumb place.
I have to agree, But then John sent me a shout about I guess that was in June. And then about six weeks later, it was the first of August, and somebody said, oh, there's a big party out on Walden Island. Yeah. Why don't you go on out and see what it's like? Anyway, it's one of those wonderful, warm, sunny, dry days Mhmm. And beautiful. Just beautiful.
I said, why don't you go look around this piece of property and, oh, oh, wait. I'll do that. And it was gorgeous. And autumn had already started because it hadn't hadn't rained for a month, and that meant that the madrona leaves had fallen.
And so, ah, these beautiful open meadows in the woods and that crunch, crunch, crunch of big old dried madrone leaves. Oh, I fell in love.
And no amount of smart thinking and naysaying by my sweetie did prevent me. So I just I think it was two or three days later, I just signed up to the Sheryl, buy a piece of land out there, and I haven't regretted it at all.
There have been some doubts, of course, but regret, no.
It's it's truly beautiful out here. I'm glad for that.
Wow. Well, we love it out there in the San Juans, and that's where we, Kimberly, my wife, and I go there. You know, we make it there once or twice a year. We even went on our honeymoon, out to Lopez.
So Oh, great.
And, gather gather gather our sea vegetables out there on Lopez, every every year if we can make it.
So let's see. You know, you're so you're out there and and something I'd like to to to start with here is, is, the people can kind of get in touch with, or kind of, you know, feel what you're experiencing out there. Like, this is process I want to talk a little bit about more about sea vegetables later but before we get into all that, it's just the process of like, you know, how do you do it? You're going out there, you gather.
Is there a time of year? What's the process of you going out? Because, you know, I've got this romantic image. Well, you know what I mean, romantic image of you.
Meaning, like, when I watched of Irish descent and and, of course, a man named Gallagher Sure. I spent a year in Ireland and and, living out on the rough coast and saw the, movie Man of Arran before I went there and how they're gathering.
Right.
You know, it was out on the Arran Islands where this entire island is is built with, you know, the all of the soil you see was built by people, you mostly with seaweed.
And so just like so what's it like out there, you know, and you're you're out there in this remote island and gathering this this seaweed for the for for for people, you know, for all over the world can can access to have some.
So what's that like? How do you do it?
Well, there there are two different approaches. One is whether or not there's a low tide.
Mhmm.
And so when whenever there is a a low tide, and looking at the tide chart, which is always open, I'm looking at March twenty ten tides, and so the tides which are seaweed harvesting positive, they start at at about a plus two, and then anything below that at that level or below, then I'll I'll be out there.
If the seaweeds are there and so I have all those days highlighted with with a green highlighter, So I I can see that from all across the room. Yep. Yep. Seaweed harvesting day. If the the weather isn't too either cold, windy, wavy, and then there are a couple of seaweeds that I harvest off of rock faces, which are basically cliffs Mhmm. On the the southwest end of Waldron. There's a big rocky promontory, Point Disney.
It's about four hundred foot high cliffs there.
And then also the boat whip kelp is generally harvestable only by boat. And so that means not only and it's kind of tide independent.
If it's too rough and it's not safe to go out there in a little boat, And I went out in little boats, I suppose, from the seventy two on until the mid eighties. Now, this is kinda scary. I'm gonna get myself a really big, easy to use, safe boat. So I got a thirty foot Bristol Bay double ender. I'm just a very romantic boat.
John, I forgot one thing. When you got a thirty foot boat, unless it's an unusual boat, you got a lot of freeboard. And so I couldn't lean over and reach the kelp anymore. It was too far down in the water there. Oh. And oh, no.
And so there was a kind of a special little outboard motor rig, basically just, trolling motors up on the back, until I would harvest off of there. Gosh, this is more work than rowing.
And the other thing about going out to get seaweed, which it which is boat dependent, is that if the water is too rough and that's anything more than about ten not win, you can't see it because the surface is all rumply.
Mhmm. And I hadn't I hadn't thought about that in the first days when I just harvested on on shore.
Oh my gosh.
And so I figured on, you know, in most years, there has only been about twenty one to twenty three days out of the whole three hundred and sixty five and a quarter that are suitable for harvesting the bull kelp, in part because I dry it outside hanging it from stainless steel trolling wire, basically a waste product of the the former longliner industry in the San Juans.
And after that line, it's, I can't remember, ten or twelve stranded, really powerful, strong stainless steel line. After it's been wound over and over and off the the so called gurdy, when they bring in the line or let it out, it it gets pretty kinky. So it starts kinking up and clunking. It's it's like a slinky gone crazy.
If you can imagine a drunk Slinky up to half a mile long, just you can't have that on the boat. It'll capture everybody and tie them up, and so they very carefully wrap that up and discard it.
And so I I use that because once it's tightened from the house or the workshed or a couple of trees, then it makes a nice line. It never rots, and it doesn't, as far as I could tell, leach anything out into the seaweed. But it's dried outside because that bull kelp is pretty moist. Dries down twelve to one. Yeah. And that means I need a sunny day the day after I harvest, and so it became this ritual thing of listening to the weather report.
Maybe it'll be sunny, Mark. Chance of showers. Oh, no. Can't go out. Chance of showers. Darn.
Or ten to twenty knot winds from the southwest. Oh, darn. Can't go out.
And so that just kind of limited down, but outdoor drying in the sunshine for most of the seaweeds seems to be, in my experience over the, I guess, almost forty years now, provide produces the best product, something which seems to have a nice crisp taste to it. And you don't have a house with a hundred percent humidity and a bunch of seaweed drops all over the floor.
And then sometimes, when we were doing mostly for home consumption and the boys were small, I think they were three and five, I I have harvested every numerical day of the year. I've gone out in a small twelve foot skiff for for years, used a little six horse motor.
And then, excuse me, the the last fifteen, gosh, twenty years now, I just roll.
And so I bring this stuff in and cold and wet outside.
And in the late autumn and right to now, if there's any kelp overwintering, it's up to twenty five or thirty feet long. These beautiful long fronds or leaves Mhmm. Up to a foot, fourteen inches wide, maybe an eighth of an inch thick.
Just delicious stuff.
Alright. Then hanging it in the house, and so we have a little half cathedral in the ceiling here, which is about twelve to thirteen feet.
And I'd hang these twenty foot pieces. I had to double them over, but the kids loved it because they were really short.
And so I would hang it just to about the tops of their heads, and and they would run around in the kelp forest. They know that was just great fun, but it but it's a seedling with drip, and as it dripped, it would shed mucilaginous droplets of algin.
And when that was wet, it is really slick, So we have to pay attention. So when it dried down, it looks like there is almost nothing there. So I get it is a year round possible one, is that it weighed about sixty or seventy pounds, plus then there was a six gallon can of gas. Right. And that meant that that took the place of a person, and I could get more kelp if I rode.
Yep. And then but the real clincher was when somebody they lived in down by Mount Shasta in Weed, California, sent me a terrible note. What what had I done to the seaweed?
What was different? They were getting hives and were having trouble breathing.
I said, well, maybe it's smog. You know, I can't be responsible. It's happening five or six hundred miles away. It turns out they were a medically diagnosed chemical sensitive, and the outboard motor, when it's a two stroke or two cycle, always leaves an oil slick.
Mhmm. And I just gotten so used to it over the years I never even noticed it. But when the boat would be still and I tie up to the big kelp plants, then this slick would develop around the boat and all the kelp that I hauled in went through this oil slick. And enough of it, I guess, got on the surface surfaces of the big kelp leaves that there was enough residues to cause her to have a reaction, and so that, well, I'll just up the purity level one more notch, and and I really began to like rowing.
And in o three, I built a little mahogany and Alaska cedar rowing skiff, a little twelve foot skiff at the wooden boat building school down there in Port Hadlock by Port Townsend.
Oh, man.
And what a wonderful thing. It took me three months, and I figured it was almost a thousand dollars a month. My god, a three thousand dollar twelve foot skiff, but, it's beautiful, though. Beautiful.
My my oh, my wife and my son, the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, they did a family boat building thing and they have, like, oh, it's probably like eight feet maybe, you know, like it's a small little wooden boat. It's great. Oh, it's beautiful.
Yep. So you know. And so that made it that much more interesting to roll out and get seaweed because it just skimmed across the water compared to the old aluminum skiff, which I still use occasionally.
It looks looks like the Model T of boats compared to the ones that I've built.
Not that it's exactly a Maserati skiff, but it's pretty good. Now I'm not paid to give these plugs. The Maserati, You look kinda nice. I don't know about on the water. They look a little tough out there.
I poop dead grass. You know And so onshore stuff, everywhere I harvest onshore is a walk in situation for up to a mile and a half.
Mhmm.
And so harvest volume is determined by my spine and my ankles and what what I can carry, and that also limits the amount of stuff that I have to process.
And when the boys were still living here, they're thirty and up now, then they'd help out when they were little kids, carry a little bit, and I usually had when I was in commercial production, which I'm no longer out here, then I'd have one and sometimes as many as four helpers that lived on island for the harvest season up to four months.
And so the workload was spread out a little bit over three to five people and fun. Wow. When you're out there, even though there's an issue focus or production focus, there's so darn much amazing stuff. I mean, you pick up a couple of pieces of seaweed, and there's a crab or some strange worm or something. You don't know how to class sort of strange animal or egg masses turn over a rock which has a big piece of kelp, the kombu kelp laminaria growing on it, and there'd be little fish that look like eels.
Mhmm.
And then other times, I get an eerie feeling like I'd be out there by myself and had to had to get a little bit of seaweed, and somebody's watching me. I got that creepy feeling. I know there are only forty people on the island. No road goes to this place. There are no boats out there, and I just turned around because I faced the shore to for for particular reason, mostly the glare, to avoid being sunblind and not being able to see anything underwater.
And several times, there would be these little heads popped up out of the water, and there have been up to eleven, it's the most I ever counted, river otters all out there treading water just watching me, and occasionally they make these funny noises and I can't tell, so it's territorial or look what he's doing now.
What is that animal doing there? He's pulling stuff up the bottom, and then he's rolling it up and stuffing it in something.
Is that his mouth that's there? Only his hand well, it may whatever river otters think. But they were most curious as to what I would was up to. And then when I laid back in, I'd only doubt I got upset because of the boots are only sixteen inches high, and I'd like to leave a little bit of freeboard in case those unexpected stern waves from somebody going by a couple of miles offshore, and I don't think that their their stern wave or wake is gonna come rolling in here, and I just better have enough sleep boards or my boots are gonna weigh twenty pounds each.
Right. And so they would go to where I had been picking seaweed off the rocks in the bottom, and they all seem to go down and check it out. What's he doing? Is he taking something?
Is he leaving something?
And then I've watched them, and they turn over rocks to get out those little eels, or they're not true eels, they're blennies, little fish Mhmm.
That look like eels, and that's one of their major foods, on and on. So we'd we'd all be out there together harvesting whatever we needed, and sometimes the river otter would crawl out of the onshore brush. It wouldn't even notice me, because I I tried to dress in a non threatening way, dark, of course, out in Walden where there's no laundromat.
Clothes do get a little scruffy. So I try to dress in faded green, faded gray or faded brown, and so I just fade right into the background, and the animals wouldn't notice me. They'd just come right by, or eventually I began to say, well, maybe they realize I'm harmless and perhaps even a little, what, empty headed because I'm just out there stuffing things in a bucket when I could be getting blennies to eat. Mhmm.
Who knows? Who knows? And and the other thing is I I taught all my, among many other things, taught all my students and helpers and the kids to never leave clothing on the beach in the high tide line, in the driftwood, and because you're one, you'll likely forget it. But, two, if somebody's offshore and that's either the authorities or just casual boaters, and they see clothing up there in that driftwood.
They don't know if it's got a body in it.
Oh, right. Right.
So you just don't wanna bring them in unnecessarily.
Right. Right.
No. Unless because you're out there all the time and you tend not to think about those things.
Oh, that was pretty amazing for the school kids who were out there on a field trip in a cold windy winter day. I guess they wanted to get out of school, and I think it was one of my sons saw what looked like an arm sticking up out of the sand, and they were telling me about this way I wasn't there. And so the kids all started screaming and freaking out, and they went over and it was this leather jacket which was zipped up and it it was filled up with sand, and so it looked like it was a mostly buried body with the arm arm and shoulder and all the way down to the waist sticking out of the sand. And it nice pleasant chicken too.
I think their mom was really appreciative of that, but definitely kind of a freaky experience.
Wow.
And let's see, and it's pretty pretty pollution free out here, although when I look at the aerial photographs, the mouth of the Fraser River points right at the San Juan and the Gulf Islands, which are just across the international border there in Canada.
And so, well, all those people live along the Fraser River and Vancouver. They're just pointing it right at us, and hopefully, it just goes on by Mhmm. Somewhere else. Mhmm. And in the old days, in the nineties, we did have seaweeds tested for coliform bacteria. None, fortunately Mhmm. Were ever detected, and also heavy metal contamination, which we worry about.
So that's a big that's a big issue, you know. If you're gonna gather sea vegetables is basically, you know, where are you gathering and how do you find out if it's a clean source? I mean, do you just kind of see if there's someone teaching in the area and and just gather where you think they're gathering or what? You know, I mean like, I I go gather in the San Juans because it's near me and I know about it, and I took a class out there once. You know? So I was like, oh, alright. I'll go here.
Sure.
Sure. You have to just scope out the immediate onshore environment.
Mhmm.
And one of the things I tell folks is to walk the beach, and all seaweeds, especially the ones which are here on the northwest coast, require real estate. Even the Bo Kaalp is anchored sometimes to a depth of almost a hundred feet. They all require real estate, so they're not exactly ocean plants. They are land plants which are salt water tolerant, and that means a sandy beach, unless it's got some rocks, is not going to have any seaweed. Mhmm.
And if there's a bit of a rocky cliff or, pardon me, high bank, look for bright green streaks about anywhere from six inches to six feet wide, and they are bright green. Boaters notice them and point at them, and former county health officials, one of which lives on Walden Island, even ninety now, He said, yep.
I just go along with my boat, and every time I see one of those bright green stripes, if I couldn't go ashore, I kinda mark it down the map, and then I find their driveway and say, did you know your septic system is failing?
And he says, oh, no. It couldn't be. No, no, no. He said, well, you're living on solid rock, and there's no place for that septic overflow to go except right down to the sea.
And so the high nutrient load of that septic runoff produces a perfect habitat for algae, usually not seaweeds, which can grow in the air and the water and feast on this absolute rich nutrient stream. And and so they're they're a little freshwater algae. And when you get out of the marine level, I mean, it's praseola, which is kind of an interesting name for a seaweed. Little little tiny one, but it grows just like a golf green.
Just solid plant material, you know, lots of little plants close together on a rocky surface because they they can stand the the affluence of the affluence.
Mhmm.
And other seaweeds, if there's too much absolute nutrient, won't grow there, and the theory is it's because the the critters that eat them grow even faster than the seaweeds can grow. Mhmm. And I'm talking about fungi and bacteria now, and they can't live there.
And if there's nothing but beautiful big sheets of sea lettuce, then there's probably a high nitrogen pollution source somewhere nearby. And that sea lettuce, Olavlactuca, is extremely tolerant and sometimes seems to prefer highly sewage or organic waste enriched areas.
In fact, if people were to go online and look up sea lettuce or all the Lactuca plague that I can read about last summer starting in the end of May and June all the way through the autumn, the Brittany coast of France, which is a big tourist destination, relatively beautiful the lore, ten thousand years of history.
Over a hundred resort towns were closed to tourists because so many tons of sea lettuce were growing there and just dying or piling up, and pictures of bulldozers and mountains of this stuff, they didn't know what to do with that. Oh, all that biomass. What a well, they should be taking this stuff and turning it into food or methane or something. There was more than they knew what to deal with.
And the smell of rotten egg gas, they said, was overpowering, and it was a high enough concentration of hydrogen sulfide to pose a health risk, so the health authority to close them down. And I was wondering, what's causing this? And so I read a little bit further and inquired around, and it was the pig farms which had been relocating to the Oh. Britney province, and I don't know the name of it, For the last ten or fifteen years, similar to what has happened off of the coast of North Carolina and Southern Virginia and on the American East Coast, where all of its waste goes out there and few things can tolerate those that do.
They really grow, and so that that seaweed, the the sea lettuce, which is so beautiful and easy to eat, easy to harvest. It's available at every every low tide that's there and hang it up for a few hours out in the sun or inside in a warm dry room with a little bit of air circulation, a little fan or exhaust fan. It dries, crispy, wonderful.
No. No. Are these are these when you're saying, like, like, about the runoff and where you notice things growing, are you saying when you see these kinds of things, this is where you know not to gather? Or you Yeah.
Thank you.
Okay. Right.
That was a good point of clarification. And if sea lettuce is just one of a half a dozen or more seaweeds growing profusely together, then I pretty much have a rule that says The more variety of seaweed there, probably the cleaner it is.
That's a good point.
And and right, and and that's especially for human waste, which in the short haul are the the greatest hazards.
And so if you go to the the literature, although I haven't gone to literature for almost a decade now, but certainly during the eighties and nineties, deaths from seaweed, besides gluttony and the privacy of your own home, but publicly recorded deaths were from fecal contamination Mhmm.
Of seaweeds harvested in warm water, Philippines, Hawaii, Taiwan, trying to remember where else, and the deaths were from cholera, which persists as Vibrio cholera on the surfaces of the seaweeds, and then in another case, the seaweeds had been commingled with a poisonous sea anemone, the poly, you know, polysola, and that was because the harvesters were harvesters were late one morning apparently, and they stepped the seaweeds, which they were collecting with their feet because the diet was coming in into the sea anemone anemone, which had a little intra you know, intracellular, but certainly an endosymbiotic dinoflagellate, a golden brown alga, which produces a neurotoxin called palletoxin, and there was just enough of this stuff that on the seaweeds that several people died over the next two or three days, and it was I don't remember whether it was weeks or months before they made the connection that all these people had purchased seaweed from this one family and had sheet in it raw in salad, delicious, Warm water, light green, and red seaweeds because the seaweeds were growing attached to rocks in crevices in the same places where the sea anemones were very carefully attached to the rocks.
And so I learned a lot. This is when I was working there as a consultant for DietHerbs, and they were concerned about seaweed contamination by heavy metals.
And so I looked up seaweed deaths, and it turns out that calitoxin is, as far as I I know, still the most deadly biologically produced neurotoxin in the ocean, and it occurs, fortunately, only in the tropics and subtropics.
And fishermen there knew enough, who knows from when, to take the tips of their spears at low tide and swirl them around in the sea anemone bodies. Not really good for the sea anemoneys, I suspect. And then all they had to do was break the skin of fish. They didn't really need to spear them right through the sweet spot, and the fish should be paralyzed in seconds.
Yeah. Amazing.
Poison to So get your supper, and it doesn't carry to people in the fish flesh.
So then not to frighten too many people away from using kelp, if most most people listening to this, you know, aren't as lucky as, me or her. You had to go out and nearby in your, you know, near where you live and harvest. They might be a different part of the country or not have access. So when they're looking for kelp and looking for, you know, seaweeds, where where do you recommend people, you know, purchase, you know, there if they can't harvest themselves?
Well, fortunately, I have a website, Ryan drum dot com, and I have a couple of long articles about seaweeds for food and medicine.
Mhmm.
And at the end of those two essays, like, I think they're ten or fifteen pages long each, I list companies where I know the harvesters.
There's a loose loose organization called the Seaweed Harvesters Alliance. Mhmm. And I list folks who harvest in Maine, Maine Coast sea vegetables and Maine sea vegetables, and then also the people on the California coast, Mendocino sea vegetables, rising tide sea vegetables, and then the one harvester in Oregon, Nature Spirit Herbs.
Mhmm. James Young Earth. Yeah.
Yes. Oh, grandfellow. He and his wife, Kari.
Yeah.
I interviewed him once too on this show, so you can people can go listen to this interview.
Yeah.
Yeah. And so they're they're all reasonable, thoughtful and conscientious harvesters, and it's hand harvesting.
We we like to differentiate ourselves from the vacuum oh, they're trying to remember what are they called. The vacuum harvesters harvest up to six tons a day.
That is a lot of wet seaweed, and they're paid twenty five bucks a ton the last time I talked to the harvesters of that method in Maine, and it'll really strip everything off of each. And that's little bits of rock, snails, starfish, little shrimp and things that you take it all, and then that gets dried, and most of that's ground up for fertilizer or for livestock feed and for the polymer industry, which extracts algin, fucoidan from brown algae and then from the red algae, agar agar and carrageenan. Mhmm. And so it's an entirely different intended harvest outcome, not for consumption on the table as a snack by individual people, but as an industrial product in ice cream and health and beauty products, different thing.
And so there it's a farm in Barclays Sound, Barclays Sound Kelp, started by, let's see, oh, well, names names don't matter. In the early nineteen eighties by one of Louis Droll's seaweed students, and they did solar drying, and the the stuff didn't dry very well. What is it? A hundred and twenty inches of rain a year if they're on the West Coast of Vancouver Island.
And so they end up with product that people didn't wanna eat because it looked awful, tasted already with sugar kelp, laminaria saccharina.
And so less than twenty percent of it was really pretty in the marketplace, and they found someone who would buy it to extract the polymers for health and beauty products, and I think about ten years ago, they quit trying to service the culinary markets, instead grow it on long ropes just for the health and beauty industries, and they they sell all they can grow. So locally, I think people need to be most concerned about heavy metal and extraneous, hard to pinpoint source pollution for from heavy metals, and that would be from industry or various types of biocides, wood preservatives, which are packed with copper and arsenic, and all seaweeds contain arsenic. So we better bring that right out in the open. It's in terms of you're not gonna find seaweeds that are arsenic free, and so there have been highly publicized short spikes in the Chicken Little media warning everybody, oh, don't eat seaweeds. It's got arsenic in it.
Well, all seaweeds have arsenic in them. So if you're really worried about arsenic, don't eat anything from the ocean, especially seaweeds.
And let's see. Anything else? And so away from urban areas where there's any type of manufacturing and there is stormwater runoff or actual industrial effluence going right into the ocean, Puget Sound, or into streams and rivers that are kinda empty into the nearby area. I think the the DNR, Department of Natural Resources in Washington, recommends to not eat any seaweed from Puget Sound.
Really?
So then we hear, you know, you and I are harvesting, and when are we, you know, is that our Oh, we're not in Puget Sound.
Remember, we're in the in the Salish Sea.
Ah.
And so for for purposes of recommendations, the Puget Sound starts at Admiralty Inlet over there by Port Townsend Got it.
And with the island. There's that there's a real narrow little opening that goes down into Puget Sound. And one of the main concerns has been the the spread of heavy metal poisons from the Asarco smelter at Tacoma.
Yeah, right.
It was up to fifty feet of pretty toxic heavy metal sediments, which occasionally are stirred up, and then it's kinda spread throughout Puget Sound, which as I've been informed, is almost like a bathtub, a Puget Sound. So it's it's deep down there in mid mid sound, and then it gets kind of shallow around Port Townsend and Admiralty Inlet.
So it doesn't drain very well. It doesn't have a hole at the bottom where all this stuff can leave regularly. But in the state of Washington, it is litigal for all of us with a permit.
It's called a shellfish permit, and I guess that's stretching it.
Mhmm.
Seaweeds don't resemble shellfish very much, but it was an administrative convenience Mhmm.
To just tack it on, and I think it's about eight dollars for a resident. And that gives you access to ten pounds of fresh seaweed, and that's wet, every day. And that's over thirty six hundred pounds of wet seaweed.
Mhmm.
And that's probably gonna be enough for the average animal You know, yeah. For a person.
You know what? I because we'll go get our license. We'll go up for a couple of days to vacation, hang out on the islands. I'll just take a little inflatable kayak out.
I'll gather, like, two or three kelp plants. That's all I need. I take it back to Right. The rental place we'll have, hang it up on the clothes line and get, you know, enough of the wetness out.
And then, it's enough for me to take it home and then finish it off in a dehydrator.
You know, and that's pretty much how Exactly. And that's doesn't have to be, you know. But, I gotta tell you though Ryan. I've had your your help plenty of times. I used to purchase it from where my people I apprenticed from. You know, Eaglesong and Sally at Ravencroft.
And Oh, right. Even though we're harvesting in the same in the same area, yours is always awe so much better. See, oh, and Ryan, you you failed to mention the, that you can get a PDF order form on your own website too and order from you.
Oh, that's right.
That's right. People can. And, you just have the magic about it. You know, you just your your kelp has just got the got the vibe, you know.
So Well, thank you very much.
Years of experience. We had a lot of stuff that even the chickens didn't wanna look at. It just because it's it's a matter of line drying, and that's not the line that that they're hanging on, but to not let them rewet Mhmm. Or to get damp from overnight fog or just the marine air, and that takes a lot of firewood or propane if people are doing it that way or electric heat so that they they don't rewet. It's the rewetting which seems to reactivate autolytic enzymes in the cells even though the cells are technically dead. Those enzymes will still go to work and maybe even work a lot harder if they get enough moisture, and so they will self digest the seaweed.
Wow. Wow. Well, yeah. That's, that's that's, so you can't, you gotta dry it where you are. You You can't take it home with you in a bucket.
Oh, that's right. And some seaweeds travel very well.
And so the fucus, the bladderwrack, which is available if it's growing there, there's a low enough tide every day to harvest the fucus to the bladderwrack.
And though those that's the plant, the brown seaweed, that has those little slopes or bulbs Mhmm.
About the size of the a fingertip, their little fingertip. And when you dry those down, they pop.
Mhmm.
And they're they're wonderful. They have a sweet mucilage which dries down almost like a a puff cereal between completely drunk two days. They're, I would say, essentially impossible in the climate to dry outside.
Medicino Sea Vegetables tries them by taking them inland, I think, about twelve miles from the coast where it's really hot on a summer's day there in in California, Northern California.
And and even though that seaweed is available every day, the fucus, no people had regularly consumed fucus. Even though it was there in huge quantities, nobody seems to have developed a liking for it. Mhmm. And it seems, according to my colleagues in New Zealand, that some of the brown seaweed disrupt the bacteria in the intestines of the animals that eat that seaweed. And so the the the seaweed is digesto disruptive.
And I haven't eaten enough of it to notice that. Some people Kids like to pop the the little fucus bulbs in the summer and smear the mucilage all over themselves. It is a nice treatment for a little bit of sunburn even though it is not sunscreen.
Mhmm. But other than that, nobody eats it regularly, and I've thought too bad. So It's great therapeutically Yeah. As a topical.
Yeah. Yeah. It's great. I've used it myself, kayaking, and I get sunburned if I'm out there and pull up next to some rocks.
And so I'm wondering, if you could tell folks here, well, just, you know, because, you know, kinda the end of of the of the of our time here. And I was wondering about just you know the the reason why like if someone wanted to use kelp in their diet why they would do that and also how much they really need, like, to put in their diet regularly. You know, as opposed to we we often talk, you know, do you need a lot, just a little bit, and also, like, once again, why would they wanna take this? Is it regularly for preventative things or for treatment if so, you know, there you go.
So what do you what do you what what do you think there?
Oh, gosh.
It's too bad we don't have another Oh, no.
You can talk as long as you want. But I'm just saying, like, I just wanna get a little a little snapshot because we've been talking about it here, but I I I get so into your stories that I'm, like, oh, yeah.
Maybe we should Oh, sorry, John. I'm glad I just It's great.
I love it. So it's good in my own history because it was interesting when it happened too. So three things.
The first one is iodine.
Everybody, everywhere, every vertebrate, and that's every animal with a backbone has an iodine requirement.
And no land plant seems to have any requirement for any iodine whatsoever, and so land plants are pretty poor source.
Mhmm.
Unless they've been fertilized with iodine containing fertilizer, a pretty poor source of iodine. We need it for our thyroid gland, for maintenance of our salivary glands, maintenance of our small intestine.
And for women, it's absolutely essential for the maintenance of the architecture of the ducts in the distal portions of the mammary glands, and there are a bunch of us that believe that iodine deficiency is a major factor, among some others, in the incredible rise and increase in incidences of breast cancer. Mhmm.
And salivary gland cancers are also increasing in absolute numbers.
So iodine, the most important thing you get from seaweeds. Can all seaweeds contain contain, let's say, nutritionally and physiologically significant amounts of iodine?
It is technically possible to eat too much seaweed in terms of iodine content, and these are usually the very large brown seaweeds generically called kelp. Mhmm.
And that would be Icelandic kelp, Norwegian kelp.
See. Atlantic kombu, let's see, Pacific kombu, and those can be up to eight thousand, especially the actual anti kelp, eight thousand parts per million iodine.
And the study was done in Japan on women on the North Island of Japan, Hokkaido, who had large presenting goiters on their necks, which is basically a facultative, usually enlargement of the thyroid gland, and these were visible masses And then discovered they were eating large quantities of kombu, which is a big brown seaweed, laminaria japonica, and they had the patients in the study just reduce the amount of kombu they ate, and and all except two of them, this will affect almost all women.
Their so called goiters or enlarged thyroid glands shrank down to so called normal size of the bounding house.
And the two women whose goiters did not shrink, they said, oh, what's going on here? And they had all kinds of worries, autoimmune disease, but it turned out that the women would rather eat a lot of kombu seaweed in their miso broth and in their fish soups and have the goiters. They said, our husbands don't mind, and we don't either. Oh, feisty women.
Maybe they're eating too much seaweed. So I've I have been recommending over the years that people start with a half an ounce of dried seaweed or less, and so that there'd be about fifteen grams. And since I learned to think in Metri, then I recommend around five grams a day. So that's one sixth of an ounce.
And so that's about an ounce a week. And unless the stuff is really yummy, like the dried bulleted kelp chips you were referring to, just disappeared into food. Mhmm. My kids thought for years that oatmeal was always green, that pancakes were always green, that popcorn always had little green spots on it because they sometimes didn't want to take the time or couldn't be bothered with eating the big pieces of bullwhip gout.
So I just grind it up to a powder for them, and we didn't use salt. We had no salt in the house for human consumption. We just had it for tanning hides or preserving animal hides. Mhmm.
We did not have salt for table use. We got enough of it from the bull kelp, which is at minimum twenty five percent minerals dry weight. So he has, what, a pound of dried bullet gel. He's got at least a quarter of a pound of minerals, And that's every mineral cation, metals that you require for your enzymes, coenzymeatic factors, as well as lots of calcium, potassium, magnesium, sodium.
Pretty good stuff. So after iodine, it's the other essential minerals and elements that we need, and that's why the people in that film, Man of Iran, on Inishmore there, I actually went there in the nineteen ninety nine to view those fields, and there are people who acted in that Robert Flaherty movie still living there.
Wow.
And they talk about all that, and they point out the fields, and they really are just a rocky wasteland.
You know, you know, I I when I was grow. When When I was there, I went there there in ninety four and I I took I, I guess I was in my early twenties and I'm and I'm I'm camping and putting up my tent in just some little field, you know, and I'm just like, I'll just camp here, you know, in some rocky I mean, it looks like just like grass, you know, and you're there and you're thinking you're on a field and then you bang your tent stakes. You bang your tent stakes down, and it goes, like, two centimeters until it hits the rock, like, rock. And you're like, oh, I guess there's no dirt on this island, so I just, you you know, gathered rocks to put hold my tent down. And I've never camped in a windier.
It was just insane. Like, I didn't know what I was setting myself up for.
Exactly. That's when you go to the youth hospital.
I know.
That's exactly We had a similar experience.
We thought we were gonna rough it. So back to after minerals, and oh, so if you're, say, eat an ounce a week, and they're fifty two weeks in most years, so that's three pounds of dried seaweed a year, and I encourage people to mix it up. So one pound, one to two pounds of brown seaweeds per year per person and one to two pounds of red seaweeds per person per year.
And I figured when I kind of looked at how much I harvested for home use, certainly, and how much I ate between ten and twelve pounds of dried seaweed a year, so about a pound a month Mhmm. Which seems like hardly any to me.
Right.
And and so the other thing is that erratic consumption of seaweed usually, just in most of us, will just bulk the stool.
It will not be digested very much. One of the advantages of having powdered seaweed or powdering it just in a little food mill at home is that the small pieces and the great increase in surface area give intestinal bacteria better access to the seaweed to consider whether or not it's going to be treated as food. Mhmm. And there have been some pretty funny graduate student experiments at Woods Hole when I was teaching in the marine algae course there, where they'd see who could eat the biggest piece of nori, which is a kind of a a rubbery one or two cell thick sheet. Who could eat the biggest piece of nori and have it come through completely unscathed?
And it didn't happen every summer, but very definitely, the the Asian students could swallow a lot bigger piece of Nori. They know how to either wrap it up in a something and swallow it whole, and it would come out whole. They didn't chew it.
Right.
And then a professor from Yale, I believe it was G. M. L. And Hutchinson, the same as limnologist, was there sitting around with the captain Kidd in Woods Hole, just kind of lording over it. Well, he showed up, the graduate students and the postdocs and a couple of the teachers, and he said, how do you know they actually ate it?
And that was the end of those experiments for several years. You're welcome to edit this out. But I I would have patients when I was in clinical practice, especially in Albuquerque, because I had asked them to examine their stools regularly to see what they were were digesting, and they would say, see, we'd come through just so nothing had happened. And I said, that's right. Because your bacteria are reluctant to commit to a whole new set of digestive enzymes for themselves unless that's gonna be a regular food event. And so we found out that it takes anywhere from four weeks to four months for most people to develop digestive prowess or their intestinal organisms to develop digestive prowess to actually digest the seaweed.
Oh, wow.
And then you start getting the polymers. So after iodine, minerals, then it's the long chain phytopolymers, algin, fricoidin, carrageenan, and agar agar, which both the stool and so they tend to make for a softer stool, especially in people who have a tendency to constipation.
And they also pick up heavy metals, those phycopolymers, from your food stream and from your body in general. And so on my website, in one of the papers in particular. I think it is medicinal uses of seaweeds where I discussed some of the recent research showing that regular seaweed consumption, particularly of brown seaweeds, enhances the excretion of PCBs and other poisonous and cancer causing substances, such as dioxins, from people. And we've got a about a twelve year average half life in the body of dioxin, and I think PCBs, I could be getting these mixed up, up to twenty years half life. Mhmm. And so the sooner you can start removing that stuff from your body, the less likely you'll suffer from, well, what, nano events where cells die or enzymes are clogged or cells are disrupted by these extremely toxic substances. So it's not the the seaweeds provide not only nutrients, but also cleansing molecules which pass out in the stool.
And then topically, of course, they've been used as skin washes and scrubs and rinses for thousands of years. It's a minimum of a hundred dollars an hour in the fancy spas in southern France.
Mhmm. Mhmm.
Which when I tried to get into them, even using my kids as entry, nope, for women only.
The Irish were a little bit more gender neutral and in a couple of places they'd say, you're the first man we've ever had in here.
Uh-oh, what does that mean?
I guess Irish men were not that eager to go to the phyllotherapies places.
And so seaweeds dried at home, not only to drying, but to keep them there, they need to be stored in airtight waterproof containers.
A seaweed is just like a sponge on a rainy day. They're hygroscopic.
Because of the high salt content of most of them, they'll suck water out of the desert air. It is amazing. And over time, they'll get kind of soggy, and then that auto digesting process will or prosthesis will start again, and there will be a distinct deterioration in odor, color, and taste.
Got it.
And some people in the old days, they're so nice, they'd buy a pound of this and a pound of that from me, and the seaweed was dried to a hard crack, and if it was a food grade clear plastic bag, it was just for a short period of time. And some and times I didn't mention that, and every time that bag was moved or pushed, those sharp little seaweed ends would cut little holes.
And within a week or two or having been opened every day and then put back on the shelf, It was just porous, and the seaweed would get pretty inedible in terms of presentation.
I tell, oh, all you have to do is just put it in a food dehydrator and dry it Mhmm.
And it'll be perfectly most of the large commercial, I guess, multinationals, I guess, multinationals have little silica gel packs in their seaweed packages Mhmm. Right down the corner, and that's a whole another long story.
A lot of, let's see, Japanese yen.
Is that the Japanese Yeah.
Yeah.
Currency. Mhmm. Yeah. Millions of yen were spent to develop ink which wouldn't fade, because people were dying from, right, their throats getting clogged by seaweed gel from these little packets which resembled the soup stock packets in ramen noodle packages.
Oh, no.
They were the same exact size, and people just didn't pay any attention. Oh, they were supposed to put this on the seaweeds.
Sadness. That's horrible.
Yeah. And so it says, do not eat in fourteen different languages. So it's a nice way of setting other alphabets.
Oh, jeez.
And so it's a recognized problem in the the seaweed commercial industry for human consumption.
And what else can I save? I think on those packages, some of them, if you look very closely, we also have the date of packaging.
Mhmm. And otherwise, you're just left with the date to consume by, and some Nori packages have been twenty years old, and the colors on the outside have faded on the package. Mhmm. But the silica gel pack still says do not eat, and the nori itself is just slightly faded.
So seaweeds, carefully packaged and kept out of direct sunlight, have a very long shelf life.
Great. Great. Well, thank you for for your your your your telling me. These are tips that, I've learned a lot because, those little things like that I I hadn't actually taken into consideration. And now I'm like, oh okay. Well, next time I won't, you know, store my seaweed this way. I gotta find some more airtight containers.
But usually we keep a lot in a jar, you know, sealed. Right. But, but the extra because if we gather a lot I I was putting in wrapping up in paper bags and I know. That's what I was thinking to myself as you were talking.
And so people say, well, Ryan, what do you do when three or four pounds, dried kelp as it piles up? I use the square food grade buckets Mhmm. That a lot of restaurant foodstuffs are packed in four gallon square buckets, and those square bucket lids are just horrible to try and pry off, because the the prying stops at the corners. Now this is an interesting technical point. When you have a round lid, then the pry force is distributed all the way around, and you can also pick up one edge. It's like removing a bicycle tire from the rim.
But with the square bucket, there are four tension points, one at each corner.
And so you can't get a traveling lift wave of force past those corners. Oh.
And I thought, jeez, why? Why'd they do that?
And somebody, I'll say, a former student of mine at Cloud Mountain Farm, decades ago, says, you want some square bucket trying? And I was remembering that back in the seventies how awful they were. I said, oh, I guess so. Is there any lids with them?
Yeah. You might as well take the lids too. Nobody wants to use the darn things. They're too hard to open, and they had been part of a raspberry farm, a Welsh's raspberry farm out there.
And I bought hundreds and hundreds of them for a quarter each.
And my wife said, jeez. What are we gonna do with all those buckets this time?
Sarah, we'll use it for some.
And then when we looked inside, we look at one of these lids, how come this is so darn hard to put on or take off? There was no little butyl rubber gasket in there. What?
And that's why they use these four point tensioner lids is because they will snap to an air and watertight seal without a rubber gasket, and that means they don't have food which ends up tasting like the inner tubes of old bicycles. You know, when you or old balloons, that terrible smell of synthetic rubber Right. Decaying that usually polydoodle.
And so all the round bucket lids from a gallon up, if you look, there is a soft rubber gasket in there. And over time, those rubber gasket materials, they fragment and off gas this terrible odor. And I noticed that when we used the round lidded buckets, our seaweeds all kinda tasted like old bicycle tubes out here where we have a lot of blackberries and no pavement.
End up patching a lot of lot of inner tubes. It's a small price to pay. And so I thought, what a great unexpected little bit of purity. So if you can get those square buckets, then with the square lids, then that is the best way to store seaweed for a long period of time. And so I usually have a second level of storage, which would be a large screw top jar, a gallon jar, or about a four liter jar from Canada, just a little bit bigger.
And that way, kids and visitors and my child with easy access. Right. Because it's it's a major aerobic exercise to and fingernails get broken. See, I'm looking at a thumbnail.
You have to have some work done on it here.
Trying to pry those darn lips off.
But that's alright. You're eating so much seaweed that your nail health is doing quite well.
Oh my gosh. I frankly have to use a trim them. But it's nothing you wanna do accidentally, of course.
Right. Right. Well, you know, Ryan, I really appreciate you, taking your time out with us today. And just so, everyone knows, you can, read, like, find out more information on edible medicinal uses of sea vegetables, and y'all and Ryan also has lots of articles on thyroid issues and, as well as other northwest herbs and things. This is a great in-depth articles ryan drum dot com where you can also order sea vegetables from Ryan and also find out about where he's doing classes not only not only your, you know, when you travel conferences, but also, if you are up in the northwest or from here or planning on coming up at some point in the summer, try to time it with, with a class, with a with a half a day class and and he does them, around the San Juans, sometimes Seattle, Bellingham. And, and, thanks so much, Ryan, for joining us today. Really appreciate your time, out, you know, taking your time out of your, your busy day out on that remote island.
Oh, thank you, John. It's a great delight to talk about my my friends of seaweeds.
Thank you so much.
And it's it's high tide right now so I wasn't gonna dash. Oh. It will be this evening.
Okay. Alright.
Okay. Take good care.
You too.
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