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Carola Puracchio serves the table at her house in Camarones, a small coastal town that lives off wool production, fishing and, in recent years, tourism. The gallery is in front of the stark blue of the sea in the Patagonian province of Chubut. She presents her sea food: scallops, grouper ceviche, pickled squid and seaweed. Lots of algae. “This is a fritter from a luche,” she says about one of the species on the table. “These are wakame bites,” she adds.
Shrimp has a history with algae. There they were always harvested and marketed until production was forgotten and weakened compared to other more profitable industries. Puracchio not only decided to revalue edible seaweed with its small restaurant and production of preserves under its brand Love, but also to give special emphasis to wakame (its scientific name is undaria pinnatifida), an exotic species native to China, Korea, Japan and Russia that arrived in Patagonia with ships in the 90s and began to colonize its coasts.
“My dad had a restaurant for the town workers so I grew up with pots and pans. But I never thought about dedicating myself to gastronomy. I liked to make it for mine, with the idea that my children would eat better. I started as self-taught and then took pastry and bakery workshops. Then I continued researching and trying strange things,” she says.
Following a cooking course promoted by Patagonia Azul, a Foundation project Rewilding Argentina that seeks to expand the protection and restore the ecosystems of the Argentine sea, Carola began working with algae and decided to start her venture. “We accompanied her in the process of setting up her small restaurant and obtaining permits to sell her canned goods. Harvesting wakame does not cause any disturbance to the environment because it is precisely an algae that invades the marine ecosystem,” says Diana Friedrich, coordinator of the Patagonia Azul project.
The concept farm-to-table (from farm to table) in this case could not be more palpable: Carola collects wakame plants and other algae with her hands on a large rock that is on the beach in front of her house.
“I really like following the entire process step by step. Go look for the algae, touch it, rinse it well and clean it. For the undaria, for example, I cook it a little because it changes the color from brown to greenish and the texture a little. It's a matter of making it more pleasing to the eye because we are all very visual when we eat. But you can calmly grab it from the sea and eat it directly,” she says.
The process of setting up a restaurant, which she calls a “gastronomic house,” goes far beyond designing a menu, cooking, and receiving diners in a room with capacity for a few tables. In her case, it also means teaching and offering other flavors and textures to the Argentine palate, which consumes little fish compared to other countries in the region, as pointed out by a report from the Ministry of Productive Development of Argentina. And if Argentines don't eat fish, much less algae.
“They are like vegetables: you can use them whatever you want. I make sauces, a kind of ketchup, I grind them and mix them with flours. I make pasta. At first, everyone felt rejection. You told them the word seaweed and they looked at you strange. The first image that comes to mind is something lying on the shore, with a smell and flies around it. People told me: 'I don't eat anything that comes from the sea.' And I only answered them: 'Try it and then tell me'. “I really enjoy the surprised faces and when they change their minds,” she enthuses.
Wakame, present in several dishes at Carola's restaurant, is used in miso soup, a classic of Japanese food. This algae provides six times more calcium than milk and five times more iron than 100 grams of meat, according to a study published in the scientific journal Nutrition Reviews. His project helps to revalue algae and remove these species, which, in many cases, are harmful to the maritime ecosystems of Argentina.
“Undaria was detected in 1992 on the pilings of a pier in Puerto Madryn. It spread to the south and then to the north. Now it occupies about a thousand kilometers along the Argentine coast,” says Fernando Dellatorre, doctor in biological sciences, professor and researcher at the National Technological University (UTN) and member of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET).
In these years since its detection, some measurements of the negative impacts were made. The first damage, according to the specialist, is due to “competition” with other native algae. “It is a dominant species, which limits nutrients and light to other algae. A decrease in the abundance and diversity of native macroalgae species was recorded due to the presence of undaria. It also strongly affects the dynamics of reef fish, such as salmon, grouper and bass. “These algae cover the fish's caves and affect their behavior,” he details.
Dellatorre believes that there is no technical possibility of eradicating this type of algae present on dozens and dozens of kilometers of coastline. Much less after several decades of expansion. “The reproductive structures of these algae are microscopic and can be easily dispersed. They release billions of spores and are several meters deep. Imagine that it is difficult to deal with terrestrial pests. Much more so if they are aquatic,” she warns.
In any case, he believes that a good way out—a way to transform the problem into a solution—is the development of food for human consumption based on macroalgae. Even in other geographies, possibilities are opening up in fields as varied as cosmetics and the production of biofuels with low ecological impact. Dellatorre founded, together with a partner, a small company that is already marketing wakame-based products, with operations in the city of Puerto Madryn. His project and Carola's help revalue a Patagonian coast forgotten by the majority of Argentines. And a punished sea, with industrial fishing production in which trawl capture predominates.
“There are businessmen interested in producing wakame in the region. One of the reasons is our pristine sea, with hundreds of kilometers of coastline that have barely suffered human passage. Our Patagonian coast is forgotten,” he says about the venture that is looking for capital to expand.
Time passes peacefully in Carola's gallery. He says that there are diners who arrive at noon and stay until five in the afternoon, enthralled with the sea, the dishes and the stories. She likes to say that the sea defines the menu, that they work “with what she decides to give us at the moment you make the reservation.” In addition to dishes based on seaweed, they are supplied by local and artisanal fishermen.
After a couple of years out of town for work reasons, Carola is happy to have returned. “I was born and raised in Camarones. I raised my children feeling like they belonged here. All my life I consumed products that we took from the sea and ate. These waters are clean and have incredible diversity. Paradoxically, everything that is taken from our waters is exported and nothing remains in Argentina. “We could live peacefully off what the sea gives us.”
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