top-quark.blog
Yummy..
Thu, 08/18/2005, 01:57A lot of people don't realize just how quickly aquatic and hydroponic plants grow, compared to the houseplants in one's daily experience.
One week in my biofilter yields... Two pounds of duckweed, strained and squeezed of water, with the scale tared. This is from waste water off my aquariums, in a 2x3 foot sump, illuminated with a 15 watt fluorescent tube. By no means ideal, and really without any effort. No surprise the stuff's called duckweed. I wish only that there was a market for the stuff. Maybe it could be bagged and sold as salad. With enough marketing spin, I'm sure the public could be convinced that the little snails in it are a protein/calcium bonus. A bit like crunchy croutons. Mmmmmm..
Actually, I don't have any idea of duckweed's nutritional worth. I assume that it's like lettuce, in that it's pretty decent in Beta carotene/Vitamin A and Potassium, but otherwise mostly worthless. Even if it were devoid of nutrition, though, I think that duckweed would be an ideal candidate for genetic manipulation to enhance the nutrition. It thrives in junk water, and its biomass amplifies frighteningly fast. You could get a kiddy pool filled with wastewater, put it under lamps or the sun, and you'd have the duckweed covering the surface in no time flat.
Naturally, nobody would pick this over prime rib. But, as they say, beggars can't be choosers. Besides the obvious application of feeding the crap parts of the world, it'd be a decent enough key crop in something like a fallout bunker, or extended space flights. The buoyancy of the plants is just a shade higher than neutral; if you kept the water volume agitated, you could conceivably produce MUCH higher yields under artificial cultivation.
Along the same lines as duckweed, though, I've read before that there's research being done with blue-green "algae" (cyanobacteria) for food production. People with more money than sense already pop spirulina pills, but the proposals I've seen involve large plots of land with shallow water. It just bothers me, though, given my experience with the stuff in my freshwater aquariums.
FWIW, this image was titled "greatsatan.jpg" It usually forms a massive gooey sheet that no fish or snail touches, and it smells like something awful. I think I just threw up a bit in my mouth just now. (Well, not really...) I don't claim to have extensive knowledge of the variations between BGA species, but generally speaking, I'd starve ten times before putting BGA in my mouth. Duckweed, at least, has texture and form, instead of being shapeless slime. Duckweed kinda looks like pesto, too...