By Jennifer Lague

On Saturday, August 30^th there was an all day event on the SMCC waterfront called Maine Seaweed Festival. The Festival consisted of many tents with vendors who sell seaweed-based products: a tent for lectures about the uses of seaweed, children’s activities, yoga and live music. The festival was by Hillary Krapf and further information can be found at the website seaweedfest.com or on twitter and facebook at #seafood saturday.

The festival was based around encouraging and building up seaweed businesses. The vendors sold some lovely edible seaweed products and also some seaweed supplements and seasonings. There were information pamphlets available from Maine Coast Sea Vegetables about the health benefits of consuming seaweed like preventing cancer and treating radiation, or heavy metal poisoning.

Seaweed is an up and coming mainstream commodity and is basically a resource that is plentiful since it comes from the ocean and it can be used for everything from body products to food, to just being medicinal. In fact, we are no longer going to be calling it seaweed, but rather the new term is sea vegetables.

These sea vegetables contain key components essential for good health and emotional balance. Many contain micronutrients, vitamins, amino acids, and sixty trace elements, including the essential elements iodine and sodium. Seaweed has almost no calories and is extremely low in fat. It possesses anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory properties that provide relief for many physical health conditions. The list of what they can be helpful for includes diabetes, digestion issues, obesity, detoxification, and cardiovascular issues.

If you would like to learn about sea vegetable products then check out these fabulous vendors: Maine Coast Sea Vegetables at seaveg.com, VitaminSea at vitaminseaseaweed.com, and you can find wonderful recipes at oceanapproved.com.

You could also go on a Maine Intertidal Adventure with coastencounter.com, learn about the Maine Seaweed Council who strives to protect and promote the sustainable use of macroalgae harvested from and grown in the coastal waters of Maine at seaweedcouncil.org, get sea vegetable supplements at 4source.com, learn about seaweed at the Sea Grant Maine at USM website seagrant.umaine.edu, and lastly, the National Center for Marine Algae and Microbiota are pioneers in the field of algal culturing and are at ncma.bigelow.org.