Fooding Up: The Seaweed Sandwich

No matter what happens to the food supply, there'll always be algae - vast groupings of unicellular plants that are most familiar as simple seaweed. Sure, that's the case now, but once the Grim Meathook Future inevitably arrives, what we today dismiss blithely as "seaweed" will be the foundation of civilization! Wars will be fought over access to seaweed supplies! Everyone will have their seaweed cereal and seaweed burgers and seaweed steaks and work to carve life out of a world gone mad!

Until then, it's strictly an ancillary food item, but why not acquire a taste for it? Today, known as roasted seaweed or nori, it's most commonly used to wrap sushi and onigiri. If you're in the Vancouver area you can get it on top of some Japadog hot dogs, and if you have your own supply they go well with burgers, sandwiches, or whatever you fancy, really. I've heard the taste of nori sheets described as salty, but really there's nothing in standard North American cuisine that really matches up.

It's getting your own supply that can be the tricky thing, assuming you're not in East Asia. Roasted seaweed has only been available in North America for fifty years, and it's always been closely associated with Japanese cuisine over here. I don't recall ever coming across it in Ontario grocery stores, but when I found that Donald's Market was selling ten packs of nori for under five bucks, you'd better believe I snapped that up. I mean, it's imported Korean seaweed that comes in packages covered with writing that I can't even begin to understand. What's not to love?

I wouldn't be surprised if part of that lack of availability comes down to the associations that come with the word "seaweed" in European Canadian culture. It's a negatively loaded word, and a lot of people just aren't that interested in challenging themselves. I can imagine that if you're white, there's at least a fair chance that the idea of eating seaweed hits you as being rather grody. Yet it's just one of the casual assumptions that European-origin cultures have carried with them over the centuries. The same algae that's used to make nori in East Asia exists in Europe as well, after all. It just comes down to different cultural priorities that it was domesticated in one place but not the other.

Nevertheless - to the food! It didn't take me long to discover that nori makes a perfectly good snack all on its own; with individual sheets being practically two-dimensional while remaining taste sensations, they're rather easy on any diet plan you may be on as well. So I thought I'd depart from my usual subjects a bit to write about the seaweed sandwich - undoubtedly a staple food of the grim, dark future! It doesn't really appear to be a thing yet; my Google searches generally turn up combinations like tofu and seaweed sandwiches, but even those are buried below video game and SpongeBob SquarePants references.

Here's what you'll need:

• 2 slices of bread
  
• 4 or 5 sheets of roasted seaweed
  
• Butter or margarine

Preparation is extremely simple. First you take the bread and, very lightly, add butter or margarine as if you're adding Vegemite - you only need a small bit, otherwise the flavor of the seaweed will be overpowered. Once that's done, add the nori sheets, close, and eat. Preparation time: about twenty seconds. If you can make toast, you can make a seaweed sandwich.

Also, cut it diagonally. It looks classier that way.

On its own, it's just a snack - nori is light enough that it doesn't come close to being a meal, any more than two slices of bread would be a meal. But it's a good snack, full of greens and sea vegetable power, and healthy to boot - 3.5 grams of nori, so about maybe six sheets, contains ten calories, zero fat, zero cholesterol, and fifteen percent of your daily recommended Vitamin C intake. Plus, it's good, with that special seaweed tang. So if you come across packages of roasted seaweed in the grocery store, pick it up and try it!

Now, though, it's time to eat. That sandwich you see up there? That's my breakfast.

Transparency for Breakfast

These days a lot of people want to be careful about what they eat. Plenty of folks out there want to be sure they're getting the vitamins and minerals and whatever else they need to keep their bodies from breaking down like the slowly decaying organic husks they are, so that they can live longer and healthier lives and, if American, perhaps stress less over what the state of health care will mean for those first two things.

But these are also busy, just-in-time, go-go-go days. How many people have the time, energy, or inclination to prepare proper meals for themselves before or after work, when it's so much easier and more convenient to stop at a fast food place and let them do all the work for you in a jiffy? Personally, I buy microwaveable vegetable burgers in an attempt to do an end-run around at least part of that, but it's common. Nor is it necessarily conducive to a long and healthy life. It's just one component in the massive increase in obesity that's been happening in North America since the middle of the twentieth century - because people can't really know what they're eating.

Technically, that's not true. I know that in Ontario at least - not being a conoisseur of British Columbian fast food fare - you can go into a Burger King or McDonald's or what have you and find a nutritional information sheet posted on the wall somewhere; but it's out of the way and the font size is small, and if you had time to kill squinting at a column full of riboflavin percentages, you wouldn't be in a fast food place, right? Really, though, it's the sort of thing people don't tend to notice, and as a result it can't affect their habits.

It doesn't have to be this way, though. Soon after I landed in San Francisco, I stopped for lunch at the In 'n Out Burger at Fisherman's Wharf, and noticed that the menu board listed the calorie counts of all their items. What a sterling example of 21st century corporate citizenship! I thought. Then I noticed them in Burger King. And Starbucks. And Jack in the Box. And Taco Bell. And so on.

Obviously something was going on. There hadn't been anything like this in Phoenix this January - maybe it was just San Francisco. But what?!?

Presented for your consideration, four hundred and seventy calories in food form - specifically, a Carl's Jr. chicken teriyaki burger.

Back in 2008, California passed a law that, bluntly, required all restaurants that had twenty or more locations within the state to post calorie counts on their inside menu boards by January 1, 2011 - New York apparently pushed something similar through back in 2009, and the same sort of law is on the table in dozens of other American states. This is the exactly the sort of corporate transparency that I think needs to come to Canada, now if not sooner.

This is one of those things where, try as I might, I cannot twist my brain enough to come up with any valid reason to oppose it - if you can, please let me know, so I can contemplate it. There have been similar counts on potato chip bags, on pop cans, on chocolate bars and so on for as long as I can remember, and that sort of information is an invaluable guide - if you're really jonesing for chocolate but don't want to kick yourself over the standard calorie threshold for the day, it's really good to know which one has two hundred calories and which one has six hundred.

There's nothing about a "nanny state" in all of this - I say that because I imagine any potential opposition might come from that direction. No one is saying you can't order that thousand-calorie breakfast burrito. If you like it enough, and you acknowledge it in your fooding-up budget for the day, or just want that burrito, then by all means buy it and eat it. For me, though, it gives me the opportunity to look at the board and think that's a thousand goddamn calories? Like hell am I scarfing that.

It's all about choice, and the ability to make informed decisions about the things that affect us. That's what we should continue striving toward.