Your next plate of pasta could change the world.
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That's what Shoalhaven scientist Dr Pia Winberg is hoping, with the aim of making 10 per cent of all pasta seaweed pasta.
Achieving that goal would mean we have radically transformed out food consumption, which accounts for up to 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, and ultimately, gone some way to averting planet-destroying climate change - one bowl of seaweed spaghetti bolognaise at a time
Dr Winberg has been studying the properties and potential cultivation of seaweed for the past 25 years. In her lab on the Shoalhaven river, she turns waste from the Manildra starches plant into food for seaweed, with the aim of making health supplements, animal feed and food products.
But seaweed pasta wasn't always on the menu.
"It's really hard to get people to change their ways," Dr Winberg said. "We used to stand there with bags of green seaweed and explain that this is really sustainable if you cook with this."
Not unsurprisingly, this didn't immediately have the hoped for impact.
Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way an individual can contribute to lowering greenhouse gas emissions, according to a study published in the journal Science in 2018. But, despite eight in ten Australians being concerned about climate change, only six per cent of us are vegan.
Bridging this gap between what we would like to happen when it comes to saving the planet, and what we are prepared to do ourselves is what Dr Winberg came up against with her bags of seaweed at farmers markets on the South Coast. So, the team decided to take a different tack.
"It's easier to let people take something off the shelf that they're familiar with, like pasta, and cook it rather than becoming an Asian food expert and thinking that that's how they have to eat it," Dr Winberg said.
While seaweed has been part of humans' diets for thousands of years, and can be found in popular products such as yoghurt and ice-cream and thickening and emulsifying agents, more broadly, the modern industrial food system that produces the products we find in the supermarket has largely overlooked seaweed, Dr Winberg says.
"It's always been there in human civilisations, we just need to put it back."
Including more seaweed in our diets would reduce the emissions associated with intensive agriculture and instead draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, as seaweed forests act as natural carbon sinks. Thus, the goal of 10 per cent seaweed pasta.
"If we put 10 cent seaweed in all pasta in Australia, that would save one million hectares of land production, including all the fossil [fuel-made] fertilisers that go with it. And our pasta can be eaten just with spaghetti bolognaise, if that's your thing," Dr Winberg said.
"It's a really simple way to have a big impact, without people having to make a huge change. They just have to choose the seaweed pasta."
Dr Winberg and her pasta will be at this Sunday's Greenfest at Corrimal High School, organised by Corrimal Rotary Club. The Nowra-based researcher joins a range of community groups and other environmental leaders to offer practical ways to address the climate crisis.
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