About this Research Topic
Food preferences are driven by cultural heritage, social context, and economic factors, which together comprise the ‘food environment’. Climate change, demographic change, and socio-cultural and economic changes compel the food system to undergo deep changes and reorganizations to achieve the SDG-related goals of secure and sustainable, and healthy diets worldwide.
To meet these goals, new sources of nutritionally rich and affordable food are likely to be required. These foods need to meet evolving consumers preferences, which can also be shaped by exposure to new foods and ways of preparing and consuming them. Food system stakeholders, including chefs and food processors, and retailers are taking up this challenge by looking for unconventional, underutilized protein sources of vegetable origin directly, intended for human consumption, either directly or indirectly in the form of feeds for aquatic animals and land-based livestock.
Into this frame, seagrasses appear with increasing frequency. These marine plants are distributed worldwide except in the Antarctic Sea and are the foundation of an important ecosystem that provides a range of ecosystem services to humanity, including food, marine sediment stabilization, protection against coastal erosion, and sequestration of carbon. Seagrasses are already present in the diets of coastal populations, especially of Southeast Asians, and have recently appeared in Michelin-starred restaurant dishes, suggesting they could be widely appreciated. The traditional food culture of populations who consume seagrasses has not only highlighted the potential of seagrasses as a source of nutrition but also the possibility to farm them in the coastal environment, in ways that don’t lead to land-use conversion and which instead contribute positively to carbon dioxide uptake. Thus, farming seagrasses is a ‘nature-based solution’: it may provide ecosystem services while providing a sustainable resource of human and/or animal food.
Despite this potential, only a few studies have explored seagrasses’ nutritional profile as well as farming methods. The aim of this Research Topic is to produce a wide overview of the state of the art of human use of seagrasses and the future perspective of this field of research. This Research Topic welcomes original research, interdisciplinary studies, and reviews covering ethnographic surveys, farming methods, seagrass nutritional profile for humans and non-humans, and seagrass use in the pharmaceutical and cosmetic fields.
Submission of papers on topics including but not limited to the following is encouraged:
• Ethnographic studies on the traditional uses of seagrasses
• Traditional and new seagrass conservation, restoration, and farming methods
• Seagrass nutritional profile studies
• The use of seagrass in animal feeding and zootechnics
• Optimization of conditions to increase seagrass nutritional profile
• Seagrass metabolites in-vitro and in-vivo toxicological studies
• Seagrass post-harvest changes in nutritional, biochemical, and pharmacological activities
• Economics of supply and demand of seagrass for human use
To meet these goals, new sources of nutritionally rich and affordable food are likely to be required. These foods need to meet evolving consumers preferences, which can also be shaped by exposure to new foods and ways of preparing and consuming them. Food system stakeholders, including chefs and food processors, and retailers are taking up this challenge by looking for unconventional, underutilized protein sources of vegetable origin directly, intended for human consumption, either directly or indirectly in the form of feeds for aquatic animals and land-based livestock.
Into this frame, seagrasses appear with increasing frequency. These marine plants are distributed worldwide except in the Antarctic Sea and are the foundation of an important ecosystem that provides a range of ecosystem services to humanity, including food, marine sediment stabilization, protection against coastal erosion, and sequestration of carbon. Seagrasses are already present in the diets of coastal populations, especially of Southeast Asians, and have recently appeared in Michelin-starred restaurant dishes, suggesting they could be widely appreciated. The traditional food culture of populations who consume seagrasses has not only highlighted the potential of seagrasses as a source of nutrition but also the possibility to farm them in the coastal environment, in ways that don’t lead to land-use conversion and which instead contribute positively to carbon dioxide uptake. Thus, farming seagrasses is a ‘nature-based solution’: it may provide ecosystem services while providing a sustainable resource of human and/or animal food.
Despite this potential, only a few studies have explored seagrasses’ nutritional profile as well as farming methods. The aim of this Research Topic is to produce a wide overview of the state of the art of human use of seagrasses and the future perspective of this field of research. This Research Topic welcomes original research, interdisciplinary studies, and reviews covering ethnographic surveys, farming methods, seagrass nutritional profile for humans and non-humans, and seagrass use in the pharmaceutical and cosmetic fields.
Submission of papers on topics including but not limited to the following is encouraged:
• Ethnographic studies on the traditional uses of seagrasses
• Traditional and new seagrass conservation, restoration, and farming methods
• Seagrass nutritional profile studies
• The use of seagrass in animal feeding and zootechnics
• Optimization of conditions to increase seagrass nutritional profile
• Seagrass metabolites in-vitro and in-vivo toxicological studies
• Seagrass post-harvest changes in nutritional, biochemical, and pharmacological activities
• Economics of supply and demand of seagrass for human use
Keywords: food culture, diet, medicinal food, food supplements, food chemistry, blue food
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
