Hijiki: Death by Seaweed?

Arsenic. Every time I hear that word I think of anything by Agatha Christie. You know, isolated old manor houses and stuffy butlers. Not Japanese foodstuffs.

I'm staying with a friend of mine, Orlando, in New York. He is crazy about the Japanese seaweed, nori. When I first met him, this is what he was eating. He buys sheets of it that are normally used for making sushi, except he skips the rice and the raw fish and the painstaking preparation, and just devours it the same way I would a pack of McVities Plain Chocolate Digestives. They’re biscuits…uhm…I mean cookies. It’s a British thing.

While out grocery shopping the other day I came across something black, glistening and messy (no, not that!) in a plastic container that resembled a lab experiment not only gone wrong but also forgotten about for months.

The fact that this substance was in an upmarket organic grocery store nestled in-between the fresh salmon and roe clued me in on it purporting to be something edible. Once the girl behind the counter explained that hijiki is a type of seaweed, it transformed in my mind into one of those foodstuffs that you look at and just know it’ll give you ten times more nutrients than the most nutritional food you’ve ever eaten.

So I bought it for my seaweed-loving friend and took it home, because as much as he loves the stuff he always seems happy to offer me some too. Nice guy. I would offer him some of my McVities Plain Chocolate Digestives too if I could find any in America.

As I’d never heard about hijiki nor seen it before, and being curious by nature, I decided to look it up and allow myself to be amazed by the abundance of good stuff I knew would reside in this little packet of moist dark matter. Well, it didn’t let me down, I was indeed amazed, but for the wrong reasons.

It turns out that hijiki isn’t only packed with good stuff, it’s also loaded with arsenic (apparently there’s a bad kind of arsenic—organic—and a worse kind—inorganic. Hijiki of course plays host to the evilest of the twins.) Food standards authorities in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have advised against its consumption altogether. Their American and Japanese counterparts haven’t followed suit. I can understand the Japanese stance. The last thing the government will want is a bunch of senior citizens digging up and polishing their old Samurai katanas and partaking in an uprising against the disturbance of their traditions.

It seems to be a ‘better safe than sorry’ scenario, because nobody has officially even fallen ill from it. The Japanese traditionally eat it with relative frequency but in small quantities. I don’t know what the story is in the US but I’m guessing they’ve decided that nobody really eats it to the degrees where it would be a concern, so they’re not bothered. Maybe they need to visit the grocery store I bought it from, where they happily sell portions of hijiki that are twenty seven times more in weight than the maximum daily amount recommended by the Japanese Ministry of Health...with no health warning attached. After that visit, maybe they should make another one to meet their most seaweed-loving citizen, Orlando.

I’m pretty certain that if he was at home when I returned from the store, he would have thanked me hastily and downed the whole portion in one sitting. Remember Cookie Monster? Well, Orlando’s just the same. But with seaweed. And a lot less messy. If someone was to be the first reported casualty of hijiki consumption I would rather their name didn’t begin and end with the letter O. Of course, I’d rather nobody was the first reported casualty, but either I’ve got my math, or my research wrong, or selling hijiki in the quantity I came across is bordering on manslaughter.

Anyone out there know any different? Until I hear otherwise, I'll be sticking to the McVities Plain Chocolate Digestives.

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