That was the cheery message a few years ago. Here's what triggered the memory.
From Hakai Magazine:
The Savory Possibilities of Sea BeansIn Charleston, South Carolina, Heron Farms is attempting to grow a gangly, salt-tolerant plant in the face of sea level rise.
Sam Norton didn’t think too much about the first sea beans he foraged from the fragrant pluff mud just north of Charleston, South Carolina. In 2003, he was a curious kid attending marine science camp, and he relished crunching on the salty shoots as a summertime novelty. As he began a master’s program in environmental studies more than a decade later, Norton began to experiment with sea bean cultivation, hopeful he could one day sell the crop to local restaurants and markets.
Last November, Norton realized his vision when he delivered his first harvest of sea beans to local restaurants and produce distributors and opened up direct online sales. The beans, which Norton packages in 30-gram plastic containers, come from Heron Farms, his nontraditional agricultural venture located in one of Charleston’s industrial neighborhoods. Instead of growing the beans in the mud, Norton cultivates them inside a 90-square-meter room in a warehouse, in what might be the world’s first indoor saltwater farm.
It’s a test case for saltwater agriculture, which Norton believes has the power to make coastal ecosystems more resilient and productive in the face of climate change and rising sea levels.
Yet until recently, sea beans, which belong to the genus Salicornia and are also known as samphire, glasswort, pickleweed, and sea asparagus, had never figured prominently in Charleston’s storied culinary traditions. “Historians know almost nothing about the foodways of the native Cusabo tribes, who might have put the Salicornia to use in the Charleston area over the previous 1,000-plus years,” says Matt Lee, a journalist and cookbook author, who grew up in Charleston. “But in modern times, we definitely have not seen any citation in old cookbooks or oral histories—or anything—that would indicate awareness or use of Salicornia.”
That’s not the case in other parts of the world. In Turkey, cooks blanch Salicornia and splash it with olive oil and garlic. Koreans dry and grind the plant and blend it with sea salt. Italians tuck the shoots into bowls of pasta; the French do the same when making omelets and terrines. Across cultures, it’s tossed into salads and preserved as a pickle. In modern global cuisine, it’s used as a garnish to infuse dishes with a pop of texture and a taste of the sea.
“When I taste that sea bean, I taste Charleston water. It’s the perfect amount of salinity,” says James London, the chef-owner of Chubby Fish, a seafood restaurant in downtown Charleston. “I got one of Sam’s first batches, and it was breathtaking.”....
....MUCH MORE
And:
Rising Sea Levels? Get to Know the Halophyte Crops
For now just a personal bookmark.
If the idea of greening deserts with canals of seawater pans out we'll be back with more.
From Aeon Magazine:
Ever since ancient times, the sowing of salt has been synonymous with severe and deadly retribution. The Roman general Scipio Africanus the Younger was said to have ended the Third Punic War in 146BC by razing Carthage, enslaving its population and spreading salt on its fields. In the biblical book of Judges (9:45), the brutal and unprincipled King Abimelech laid siege to the Canaanite city of Shechem. ‘He took the city,’ the biblical story says, ‘and slew the people that was therein, and beat down the city, and sowed it with salt.’
Salt kills most plants. In fact, it attacks them in much the same way that carbon monoxide kills humans. In cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, CO molecules exhaust the carrying capacity of your red blood cells, depriving your body of the oxygen it needs. Likewise, most terrestrial plants soak up the sodium ions and sodium chloride from salt much faster than they can absorb essential nutrients such as potassium, calcium and magnesium. Without those nutrients, they perish. Spread salt on the fields of your enemies and their crops will fail.Additionally:
More than 97 per cent of the water on Earth is saline. Wouldn’t it be cruel if nature had locked up the vast bulk of the planet’s vital fluids in a form that no plant could drink? Well, as it happens nature is not quite that cruel. Of the 400,000 flowering plant species around the world, 2,600 do drink seawater. They are halophytes, meaning ‘salt-plant’, and they might just be the answer to a question surprisingly few governments have yet asked: namely, how can we put our planet’s practically infinite volumes of saltwater to good use?
It might not be immediately obvious why such a question is worth our time. But consider: between sea-level rise and the increase in droughts and floods, the acreage available for conventional, freshwater agriculture is shrinking rapidly. Freshwater aquifers are becoming increasingly salty: among them, the Ogallala Aquifer, which covers a quarter of the irrigated land in the US. And so one of the world’s most important breadbaskets is under threat. Elsewhere, one-sixth of the world’s population relies on Eurasian rivers that trace back to Himalayan glaciers, which are themselves disappearing because of climate change....MORE
Royal Kew: "Salt Tolerance (eHALOPH)"
DesertCorp
US Salinity Laboratory: Research Databases
USDA: Salt-Tolerant Plants
Boston University BU Today: Lessons from Venice
