Seaweed is the latest food trend. Some people call it Kelp. I seem to remember it had a splash in the 70s as well. Today, however, it’s being touted as cattle food.
Featured image by Nichole Bohner from Pixabay
Yessiree Bob! We now have scientific studies proving adding a bit of seaweed to a cow’s diet causes them to belch and fart less. Of course, raising them in a pasture instead of a feed lot does much the same.
All of this to combat global warming. All of this also assumes that there is enough seaweed to be harvested to feed the cattle and that we won’t kill off one or more species of marine life by harvesting 100% of its natural habitat.
Of course, we found out that the COVID-19 lock-downs improved air quality world wide. When everybody stops flying and most people stop driving to work, air quality improves and holes in the ozone magically close. So, if you really care about the planet don’t get on an airplane! I’ve written about the ozone and planes before on this blog.
Culture Changes
A good number of us will be opting to work remotely once we’ve vaccinated everyone on the planet for COVID-19. Now that it has been forced on companies they have finally had to put everything in place to allow it. Yes, I do like traveling to a client site and hanging out with new faces for several months, but I’m going to park it on the farm for a couple of years.
More importantly, businesses in high rent metropolises have found they can save a ton of money on office space by letting people work 100% remote. If you have to rent five floors of a Chicago Loop high rise to put all of your employees in, paying whatever head tax there is in the city, and you can now cut that to a quarter or half of one floor with the best view, you save more than a couple of coins.
The upside of that is, other than fogging ourselves out of our own home offices, we don’t have to worry so much about farting. Well, you do if you care about the planet and ozone I guess.
Seaweed and Farting
One can visit the most unreliable of sources: Wikipedia, and find statements claiming kelp reduces human farting.
Certain spices have been reported to counteract the production of intestinal gas, most notably the closely related cumin, coriander, caraway, fennel and others such as ajwain, turmeric, asafoetida (hing), epazote, and kombu kelp (a Japanese seaweed).
To my knowledge there hasn’t been any real studies of seaweed and human farting so some government entity should fund this. Anyone who has to ride a crowded elevator, on a train, or in a vehicle for a long ride really wants to know, “If you make everybody pop a seaweed tablet before they enter the enclosed space, will it stop them from farting for the duration of the journey?”
I’ll keep checking drugs.com and a few other sites for latest seaweed info.
Please note the research on most sites trying to be legitimate identify the individual species of seaweed used in the study. Also note the warnings about excessive consumption. You don’t want to OD on iodine and mess up your thyroid. You also don’t want to get a seaweed supplement that is full of arsenic. Yikes!
