#13: Seacosystems
Sunlight, saltwater, and solutions for a better food system
Hiya readers, happy holidays ✨ We hope this issue finds you cozy, calm, and collected, and that you manage to find some time for yourself this season – often the busiest in F&B. In fact, we’re planning to take a little lunch break ourselves for the next few months. In the meantime, keep your eyes on our Instagram for more fresh content; we’d love for you to fill out our survey, so we can get to know your tastes a little better and serve the kinds of stories you crave. We want to say thank you to all of the creators, makers, movers, and shakers who have shared their stories, thoughts, recipes, artworks and suggestions with us. And of course, many thanks to you (yes, you!) for coming along for the read. We hope you’ve enjoyed learning from our community as much as we have.
Before we head off to hibernate, we’re taking a quick trip to the beach with an under-the-sea-themed issue to tide you over (pun intended 🙃) until the spring. For starters, we have an original (& fishy, in the best way!) commission from illustrator extraordinaire Caroline Reedy. Next, Rachel Brody sits down with Sachi Singh of Rootless to talk about sustainably-sourced seaweed and the future of farming. We’ll whet your appetite with a recipe from Jasmine Senaveratna, an artist and chef who honors her Black American and Sri Lankan heritage by exploring diasporic cuisines. And lest we leave you feeling salty, we’ve got a sea of suggestions from friends and foodies to explore while we’re OOO. Wishing y’all a happy and healthy new year – l’chaim 😎 🏝
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Gone Fishin’
Trout Cafe (2021), a digital illustration for Lunch Rush by Caroline Reedy.
Caroline Reedy is an artist/illustrator living, laughing, and loving in Brooklyn. She currently studies illustration at Pratt Institute, where she dabbles in digital illustration, drawing, and oil painting. Her favorite kind of art is weird art. You can see more of her work on instagram @doot_doodles, if you dare.
Something to Chew On
Sachi Singh & Rachel Brody: From Cow Burps to Climate Solutions
Sachi Singh is the founder and CEO of Rootless, a newly launched whole health company focused on getting people to eat more seaweed, starting with the Daily Bite. She also has an excellent seaweed-infused cocktail recipe, if anyone's interested.
Rachel Brody is a freelance editor and journalist. She’s worked most recently for The Appeal, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. She is a food obsessive, former pickle and kimchi hawker, and occasional music critic.
Rachel Brody: Tell me a little bit about how you first became interested in sustainability, and in the food space, particularly.
Sachi Singh: I've mostly been in philanthropy, nonprofit, think tank, academia spaces. I went to Yale to get my Master's in environmental management in 2015. And while I was there, I started to feel pretty frustrated with the way that the nonprofit and think tank space was framing climate solutions. It felt super siloed. So I started to do a little bit of a deep dive into systems thinking and reframing the climate problem. Food just feels like the perfect laboratory to test some of these ideas. You know, it's intimate at the individual level.
I stumbled into seaweed when I was there, too. I went to the South Pacific to do a research project on climate adaptation. I was based in Samoa but got to travel to Kiribati and Fiji. I visited a seaweed farm for the first time [in Kiribati] in 2016. And there was something about it that kind of stuck. Around the same time, there was this research that came out around cow burps. Essentially, you sprinkle a little bit of seaweed in cow feed, and it reduces methane emissions from their burps by over 95 percent. The idea that you could actually build a carbon neutral dairy supply chain or beef supply chain kind of blew my mind.
RB: So how did you get from cow burps and a sustainable dairy supply chain to [Rootless’] daily bites?
SS: After I graduated, I moved into a job working in climate philanthropy in San Francisco. And when I finally was free of some of my visa restrictions, I quit my job in philanthropy and started to build Rootless in earnest about a year ago.
I went down this very deep rabbit hole around seaweed’s nutrition profile. I read all of this research – paper after paper, book after book – about how seaweed is one of the world's most nutrient-dense and nutrient-diverse foods. There's a lot of research coming out now to suggest that cultures that are eating a little bit of seaweed every day actually have less incidence of metabolic syndrome disease.
[Seaweed] has stood the test of time. It has been a part of cultural mythology and medicine and food across cultures around the world. Not just East Asian cultures, but you can find it in Scandinavian mythology, you can find it in a lot of South American and North American coastal storytelling. With that context, I was like, “I want to be eating seaweed every day.”
But I started to scope the consumer space, and I was intrigued and surprised to find seaweed is pretty polarizing. You either love it or you hate it.
RB: I was going to ask about that. Are you encountering any aversion in bringing this to market?
SS: I don't know if it's just people's aversion to trying new food, but it is polarizing. I really just want to get more people who maybe are turned off by the texture or the smell to eat more of it every day, which I think is the challenge.
RB: So can you talk more about what Rootless is and what you’re offering?
SS: Yeah, so we are a whole health company that's powered by sustainably-sourced seaweed. We’re essentially trying to get more people to eat and therefore grow sustainably-sourced seaweed. We're launching with our hero product. It's a daily bite made of four really simple ingredients: dates, almonds, seeds, and seaweed. We use powdered seaweed to avoid the smell or any issues with the texture.
RB: What kind of seaweed are you using? And how did you land on it?
SS: We are using laver, or wild Atlantic nori. The species name is Porphyra umbilicalis. It's grown in Maine, where we're sourcing our seaweed from. We work with this really great company, Maine Coast Sea Vegetables, that has been wild harvesting seaweed since 1971.
RB: What’s wild harvesting?
SS: So there’s two ways to harvest and cultivate seaweed. One is wild harvest. You go out into the ocean and just snip pieces off, but you leave enough of the organism on whatever it's attached to so that it can regenerate – so you don't over-exploit. The other way is cultivation, which is usually done a little more offshore depending on the geography, you can cultivate different species like sugar kelp, or in India they're cultivating another type of red algae.
RB: You mentioned that the goal of Rootless is also to get people to grow seaweed more sustainably. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
SS: We are super committed to growing this sustainably-sourced seaweed movement specifically. I genuinely believe that sustainably-sourced seaweed could be the future of food and farming. I mean, honestly, in my last decade of working on climate solutions, it's the one thing that's given me a little glimmer of hope.
As a foodstuff, you're able to grow this really incredible nutritional powerhouse on water. You don't need arable land, you don't need freshwater, you don't need fertilizer, you don't need pesticides. All it needs is sunlight and ocean water. And while it's growing, it actually is providing ecosystem services for its environment. It's sucking up carbon from the water column and it’s deacidifying the ocean. The shellfish in surrounding water actually have healthier shells because seaweed is absorbing all of the stuff that's acidifying their shells in the first place. So it's not only not harming, it's actually regenerating. It's healing as it's growing. And from a climate change perspective, at scale, it really could have a big impact.
To me, it was a win-win-win. How do we get this to scale? And how do we envision a better food system that's actually good for everyone?
RB: Are there other companies who you think are doing sustainable food and sort of whole system change, like you're describing, in a way that you admire or is in a way informing Rootless?
SS: Totally. I think the company that I'm most inspired by is Atlantic Sea Farms. They’re a Maine-based company, run by Briana Warner, and they're cultivating their seaweed. They're putting out long lines and cultivating kelp. It's run by amazing people, women-owned and women-run. And they're committed to growing it at the system's level. They prioritize lobster fishers to farm seaweed because they are familiar with the sea, they have the equipment, and the kelp season is complementary to the lobster season. So they're actually able to provide a year-round livelihood for these communities that are suffering from the environmental impacts of climate change on the lobster industry.
I just feel like they're doing it right. They're politically active, they're spreading consumer awareness, they're being really mindful about how they’re contributing to the Maine economy. I'm super inspired by them.
RB: People I know have trouble grappling with the issue of climate change and how they can personally try to effect change. And I think it's very smart to take this idea [of change] and essentially deliver it in the package of an Instagram-friendly, health-focused, edible format. I was wondering if you intentionally chose to go this route with Rootless to make it more appealing to folks our age, to really bring in that cohort?
SS: I was excited to explore that. I do think that there is something in the water around consumers wanting and demanding more climate-resilient, sustainable products and companies. And it's finally, you know, in corporate consumerism, cool to be sustainable. We've been banging the drum in the nonprofit community for years, and it's finally caught up to where climate, in the media, is in the mainstream narrative.
RB: To the media point, as a journalist, working on issues around the criminal legal system, climate justice, and racial justice – they’re all intertwined in a way where the volume is turned up now much more so than I remember in years past. So it makes a lot of sense that that same journey is happening in food right now.
SS: Yeah, there is something happening. I saw an opportunity, I guess, to put the power of digital marketing and branding behind seaweed – behind sustainably-sourced seaweed – to start to bridge some of these issues and make them more tangible, as you said, to the individual, to the consumer. Maybe this could be the platform for people to understand and want to educate themselves, re-orient themselves, around a better food system. If there's some way that we can change people's behavior, thought processes, intentions, even by like 10 percent, to me that would feel like a win.
RB: Do you want to talk a bit about the “Bites” on offer here?
SS: They come in three flavors. There’s an orange pistachio, a double strawberry, and a coconut chai. All the ingredients are organic. If you were to eat one a day, you get 60 percent of your daily iodine requirement, and 20 percent of your daily iron requirement in one bite, which is pretty significant. You can eat it at any time of day, so you don't have to deal with vitamins or supplements. I really enjoy eating it with my coffee in the morning. And you're just doing this one good thing for your body every day.
RB: You just soft-launched. What's next? Do you have any plans to collaborate with chefs or with other folks in future? I could definitely see some kind of “Rootless by X Maker” happening here.
SS: So we’re getting just destroyed by this global supply chain disruption. Freight and shipping rates and surcharges are literally in my nightmares. But we will launch soon. We’re starting to fulfill orders in early December. But I just want to see how people are reacting first. I would love to know how people are integrating it into daily routines. I think there's a lot of potential and room to play. I would love to partner with spice companies or companies that are mission-aligned and committed to regenerative agriculture and sustainability. I would love to work with chefs, particularly East Asian, Japanese, or Korean chefs, for whom it's part of the daily diet. They could help us innovate on new products.
I think honestly, we're just getting started. There's so much to do, there's so much excitement. This is finally now about the consumer, so we really want to deeply listen and build community and make people feel valued.
RB: Last thing: Can you please share this seaweed cocktail recipe you’ve mentioned? I am intrigued!
SS: My friend Ben made this banger for an all-seaweed dinner I hosted, and I could literally drink it everyday. A spin on a French 75: Seaweed gin (Gray Whale), kombu simple syrup, lime juice, saline solution, a few drops of toasted sesame oil, topped off with some sparkling wine.
What’s Cooking?
Jasmine Senaveratna’s Lion Salad with Grilled Turmeric Shrimp
Jasmine Senaveratna (she/her) is a restaurant service director who loves storytelling and curating experiences. She is inspired by food as culture, lived experience and personal story. The past few years offered Jasmine pathways to honor her Black American and Sri Lankan heritage, love for bar and restaurant culture, community and ancestors in her work. Her pop up series, @lionsxpearls, spotlights diasporic cuisines and is a blueprint for a future passion project. She is an artist. Find her creative work, digital illustrations and published work at jasminesenaveratna.com or @corked.wines.black.lines — and @barscapes__ for her visual and literary homage to bars.
Join Jasmine at Coterie in Charleston (@coterie_chs) on December 31, 2021 for a four-course dinner with beverage pairings for $125pp. The dinner includes a variety of dishes — from fresh-shucked oysters with pol sambol to saffron shrimp and poulet en sauce.
“My summer go-to, and friends and family favorite, is all about bold colors, spice, brightness and citrus. The crisp texture, sweet corn, spicy peppers and shrimp right off the grill pair well with dry bubbles, an aromatic white or rosé. When eating this, it’s June, I’m in good company and listening to Kool & The Gang’s Summer Madness.”
Lion Salad with Grilled Turmeric Shrimp
Turmeric Shrimp:
1 pound 16-20ct wild shrimp, shelled and deveined
3 tablespoons liquid aminos or tamari*
1 tablespoon grapeseed or safflower oil**
2 teaspoons garlic powder
2 teaspoons red chili flakes
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
2 lime wedges
Kashmiri chilli powder or cayenne pepper to taste***
Lion Salad:
8-10 small hakurei turnips, cleaned and de-stemmed
1 medium red onion, peeled and cut into wedges
2 jimmy nardello peppers****
6 sugar rush hot peach peppers****
4 ears of corn (or two 16-ounce cans of whole kernel sweet corn)
1 large tomato, cut into wedges
6 green onions, sliced on bias
2 tablespoons grapeseed or safflower oil**
Juice of 1/2 lime
Salt to taste
Instructions:
Soak 8-10 wooden skewers in water for at least 30 minutes, preferably overnight.
Place shrimp in a metal bowl and add aminos/tamari, oil, garlic powder, red chili flakes and turmeric powder. Mix together, cover and let marinate in fridge.
Arrange turnips, red onion wedges and hot peppers on separate skewers. Lightly brush skewers and ears of corn with 1 tablespoon of oil. Bring your grill (or cast iron grill/griddle for stovetops) to medium-high heat.
Grill vegetables on each side for five minutes; the goal here is to achieve some char, but retain some fresh crisp of the vegetables. Pull off heat and allow to cool for 10-12 minutes.
Shuck corn and place kernels into a salad bowl. Remove turnips, red onion wedges and hot peppers from skewers and place into a bowl. Add tomato wedges, green onions, salt to taste (I use 2 teaspoons), juice of half lime and toss together. You can serve this at room temperature (my preference) or chill in the fridge as you grill the shrimp.
Arrange approximately 4-5 shrimp on each skewer, four skewers total. Bring a grill to medium-high heat. Grill shrimp on each side for about 3 minutes (5 to 7 minutes total); they should retain a pink color while the meat is white and opaque.
Pull off heat, squeeze lime wedges over shrimp, and sprinkle lightly with Kashmiri Chilli powder or Cayenne pepper. Serve immediately with lion salad.
Notes:
*Liquid Aminos & Tamari: Gluten is avoided in my household, please use soy sauce if you prefer.
**Grapeseed & Safflower Oil: For this recipe, flavor-neutral oils that have a high smoke point are ideal.
***Kashmiri Chilli & Cayenne Pepper: Kashmiri Chilli is a staple in my house for its warmth, spice and bright, fruity notes. Using Cayenne Pepper has an earthy, deep heat—choose your own adventure!
****Peppers: If you can’t find these specific peppers, find a mix of peppers to your desired spice level; jalapeños, Serranos, habaneros… I like the peppers whole, but feel free to slice them up before mixing into the salad.
Lunch Break
A dedicated section to boost suggestions from friends & collaborators.
Becca Millstein (she/hers, CEO / Cofounder of Fishwife Tinned Seafood Co.): We recently launched our first variety pack of tinned fish, the Smoky Trio, which includes our three core products – smoked trout, smoked salmon, and smoked tuna. After a long two years of wearing nothing but black and gray loungewear, I'm attempting to infuse my closet / life with color with a couple pieces from luminescent women-owned LA brands Blockshop, Big Bud Press, and Suay Sew Shop. On the subject of pop-ups, of which there are so many great ones in LA right now, my friends at Little Fish Echo Park are now hosting private dinners in their cozy backyard - if you're looking to celebrate anything at all, book 'em fast for a magical evening. Also - Chainsaw LA makes the best chocolate pie I've ever had. On the healthier side of things I've been enjoying the heck out of my delectable little kelp bites from Sachi Singh's brilliant new seaweed company Rootless!
Michele Mirisola (she/her, artist, writer, birth doula, and creator of Chell Fish): When I couldn’t travel to Bedstuy to get to my studio during NYC’s lockdown, I needed an art practice at home. I created Chell Fish from piles of shells I had held onto, convinced I would one day use them (and I have never been more vindicated). It has been such a pleasure to have my work in Café Forgot and with Your Other Left Ear. I moved to Brooklyn Heights, where I mostly take walks with my partner Sean Morgan and write jokes for his animations. I’m obsessed with HiHi Room and it has been a dream to live so close to Sahadi’s. I am a seafood addict and am so happy to have a new purse by Prawn Cocktail to let the world know. I have been rereading Consider The Oyster by MFK Fisher and trying out recipes from the 40s. Hot tip: you can replace salt with anchovies on almost anything and live a fuller life.
Sarah Perlmeter (she/her/hers, activist, facilitator, program developer, former manager of Drive Change’s Hospitality for Social Justice & FIG community member): My loyalty to New York is most deeply reinforced by the magic that hides in ambiguously plain sight; despite and because of its complexities it is fertile soil for illuminating the limitless gifts of individuals and communities. I recently had the privilege of visiting with Yemi Amu at Oko Urban Farms River Street Aquaponics Education Center. It was the tail end of the growing season and their commitment to minimizing waste was inspiring; making kale chips to support one of their team member’s (Isa) fundraiser & drying out the last of the Okra to make paper and flour. I’m devouring The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois; an epicly immersive story of an African American family from before enslavement to the present – do not gloss over it’s daunting physical size on your bookstore or library’s shelf. My friend and brilliant Chef, Sunny Lee, has graced Peoples Wine small basement bar with a residency of her pop-up ‘Banchan by Sunny’. The featured shrimp toast will go viral, and I’m waiting for the chance to sign-up for a lifetime supply of her giardiniera and gochujang candied squid. ‘How to Cook a Wolf’, an exhibition (ended 12/11) at The Center for Book Arts, brought together a selection of artworks produced between 2020-2021 that address this time of viral and political turmoil through culinary response. Kiyan William’s How Do You Properly Fry an American Flag, blew my mind.
Talia Weingarten (she/her, works with food etc): I moved to Martha’s Vineyard during the pandemic, where there is an intense seasonal ebb and flow of energy and population that feels both natural and new to me, having lived in cities my whole life. After co-cheffing at Seaweed’s this past season during peak summer hustle, I’m settling into the quietude of the off season and being outside as much as possible. It’s been fun to be in touch with certain elemental processes of food making from a different angle, between welding my first grill and sculpting mortar & pestles from stone. We’ve been cooking outdoors a lot: grilling, burying local meat and produce in a large seaweed-lined pit we dug in our backyard, smoking bay scallops and oysters and smelt over different types of wood from trees knocked down during the recent storms, and simply, just using fire as heat. There’s nothing like cooking over open fire, and I love learning more about it. There's a lot to grapple with living here, but it feels natural to learn and move in alignment with place and community. I’m currently reading Michael W. Twitty’s The Cooking Gene, a collection of essays on Edna Lewis, and the Mosquito Supper Club cookbook – all guides on how to amplify place/history/identity through food and ritual. There is always more to say and make, but if anyone needs island respite hmu!
That’s it for this year, sweet readers. Thanks again for joining us – we hope you’ve enjoyed learning about projects that question expectations, experiment with innovative ideas and flavors, and honor cherished histories. Follow us on Instagram and feel free to shoot us an email at hello@lunch-group.com with questions and ideas, or even to just keep in touch with a nice winter note. Until next time – cheers 🍹
