The weather was perfect, with the warmth of the sunshine offsetting the salty sea breeze. It was a great day for foraging on the central coast of California. We were on the hunt for the sea’s briny bounty: seaweed.
Spencer Marley, a former commercial fisher and seaweed harvester, has been taking people on seaweed foraging excursions for nearly half a decade. The San Luis Obispo County Airbnb Experience is rated a solid five stars, and as a huge fan of seaweed, I was eager to get out there and learn more.
“The good thing is that there’s no toxic seaweed in the world,” Marley stated unprompted at the beginning of our experience, as if he could read my morbidity-prone mind. Unlike foraging for mushrooms, he said, misidentifying seaweed would not lead to death.
I dutifully followed his footsteps along the coastline by Cayucos, dodging the waves that crashed against the rocky landscape. Marley was a wealth of information, explaining that the central coast was especially fruitful for this activity because we were at the meeting ground of seaweed varieties from both the northern and southern shores of California.
Marley didn’t invent seaweed foraging, nor did he try to claim the title. Instead, he narrated a history of the area’s foragers, referencing Chinese immigrants from the 1800s who were the first documented seaweed foragers on the central coast.
As we walked along the coastline, Marley pointed out different varieties of seaweed and what they were popular for.
“This is nori, and 93 percent of seaweed consumed in the world is nori,” he said. “The Cantonese were the first to figure out it was edible 2,000 years ago. Not only would they harvest it from the wild and eat it, but it was also one of the first forms of aquaculture.”