Seaweed Eating Archive
The ‘seaweed eating archive’ is a collaboration between us (Kerry Holbrook and Ruth Klückers from The Seaweed Institute) and Giulia Nicolini (University of Exeter). The collaboration stems from a shared interest in understanding how people in Cornwall may have eaten seaweed in the past, how seaweed is being consumed today, and how this might be changing. The project is fully funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, via a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, until 31st December 2025.
To produce the archive itself, we will gather recipes for seaweed, as well as stories of and perspectives on seaweed eating from around Cornwall. We will collect these stories via written postcards and an online submission form for a limited period between May and December 2025 (dates TBC). People will have the chance to contribute at various public events around Cornwall, such as food festivals, agricultural shows, and community events. We will also invite selected individuals to contribute entries to the archive, such as local chefs, foragers and historians.
The archive aims to make visible the many different ways in which people in Cornwall may relate to seaweeds as food. The use of seaweed as a food appears to be largely absent from archives in Cornwall, even though its other uses - for example, as a fertilizer - are comparatively well documented. This contradicts a widespread belief that seaweed would have been eaten by coastal populations throughout history, including in Cornwall. The process of building the archive is designed as a ‘conversation starter’ about seaweed, food and the foreshore. In this way, we engage with the idea of the ‘living archive’ as a way of creating and sharing experiences that contribute to the collective imagination of new kinds of realities.