Diane Bernard meets us in the very early morning, in the parking
lot of Whiffin Spit, in Sooke on the rugged west coast of Vancouver
Island. It is rainy and dark, and hemmed in by forest on one side
and the wildest of wild oceans on the other.
Today, however, as it has been all summer, the morning is bright,
sunny and warm, and the beach, at the lowest of low tides, stretches
in front of us in an entire spectrum of acid green and purple, browns
and reds. Above us sits Sooke Harbour House, consistently at or near
the top of most official magazine "Best Small Hotels in the World"
lists. But below the hotels lies Bernard's seaweed beach, flat and
wide. Or part of it; the Seaweed Lady, as she is known, harvests
a 15-kilometre stretch of shoreline west of Sooke, near Jordan
River. Bernard, 51, is a woman of substance who has in mid-life
changed from activist, bureaucrat and local politician to
entrepreneur, seaweed enthusiast and messianic wild forager.
And why not? Seaweed is the coming thing. The hot new ingredient
in everything from toothpaste to nutritional supplements to spa
products to food. It's a product that is under going a renaissance.
Which is why, the day before I meet Bernard, I spend an hour at
the aerie Resort's Wellness Center, lying naked under sheets of
slimy wet bull kelp, after having my entire body scrubbed by
Rockweed Exfoliant. Rockweed, explains Bernard, "is a funky
little plant, and the product I've made is 90% fresh seaweed,
blended with ocean mud.
We work with the fruit of the weed, which we pop and out comes a
gel-like fucoid. It is the marine version of aloe vera gel-
very clean, no smell. Scientific literature is finding very healthy
properties in rockweed fucoid. Researchers are suggesting there
are both anti-tumour properties, as well as anti-inflammatory
properties. It heals irritated skin, even burns. It's exciting.
There is very strong language from the research community around
the healing properties of seaweed. Twenty years ago, it was merely
hopeful. Around the late '80's, the language became much more
direct effect."
I think I may have had one too many treatments in my life.
Someone says "aromatherapy," and I make polite noises and back
out of the conversation. I only get a massage when I have actual
pain and I never ever have facials or spa treatments. This seems
irrational and contrarian, because hey, pleasure is pleasure,
and one should take it where one finds it, so sometimes I go
back and try again. And this time, I'm actually enjoying being
touched by strangers and I think it might be the seaweeds.
After the rockweed scrub, I am covered in Alaria, a local seaweed
Bernard mixes with B.C. glacial clay.
"This clay will match any exotic French green clay, " insists Bernard.
"We have amazing wild resources. What we tend to do in Canada
is dig, cut it, chop it, catch it and ship it out in the rawest
form possible. So here's our chance to take a look at these wild
resources in a new perspective. I have some spas, who say to me,
"We only use Dead Sea Salt'. Well, we have what I call sweet
Saskatchewan salt, which for heaven's sake, we throw on the roads.
We must rethink, work on having a higher value perspective.
"I soak B.C. marine salt in four different kinds of seaweed,"
Bernard says. And why not? Our coastlines are clean; our
diversity is fabulous. Good for you to eat. Good for you to wear."
After the wrap, sheets of kelp are laid on my skin from head to
toe and I am wrapped in a blanket. It is an entirely new feeling,
a kind of lush cooling on the skin. Bernard says seaweed cools
the system, so that blood circulates faster, working internally
to warm the skin. "You sweat a little, and the seaweed doesn't
dry and tighten for hours the way most muds do."
My photographer and I order vats of the next and final step of
Bernard's spa treatment: the lotion, Laminaria.
"Aromatherapists told me to pull back from marine smells and
textures at the end of the treatment," Bernard says. So this
is 25% Laminaria, which the Japanese consider a very important
seaweed, both culturally and historically. Laminaria, releases
a gel called manitol, which science thinks offers hope for
diabetics. It has a very high vitamin content, the highest
vegetable B12 content, which is excellent news for vegetarians."
When I meet Bernard the next morning, I feel refreshed and
pacified, as if I'd spent the day at the beach and I was 10
years old again.
Bernard's family is from the Magdalene Islands off the Gaspe
Peninsula, where grandmothers stuffed mattresses with seaweed,
fisherman wrapped lobsters in seaweed and they threw it in every
cooking pot. Enthusiastic about seaweed's potential for years,
she worked first in local politics, with environmental issues
as her dominant campaign there. She ultimately landed a job as
regional director of the Sooke Electoral Area. About three years
ago, fed up with life as a local politician, in partnership
with the innovative and locally adored owners, Frederique and
Sinclair Philip of Sooke Harbour House, she threw caution to
the wind and started to experiment.
"When I went into restaurants, the chefs would say to me,
"what's this goo coming off the seaweed? Eugghhhhh! And I said,
'Look guys, super sophisticated Japanese women have been putting
this on their faces for years! How come we're using industrially
dried seaweed coming from the North Atlantic?"
Bernard began to push seaweed into the most forward-looking
operations. With the spa director of the Aerie Resort, she found
ways to bring seaweed into Thalasso therapy sessions, and formulated
lotions and serums, body wraps and soaks, exfoliants and masks that
directly transmit the slippery, intensely moisturizing effects of
the seaweed into the body.
Through her company, Outer Coast Seaweeds, Bernard's money is very
definitely, where her mouth is. She developed an entire line of spa
products.
"Medical research indicates that seaweeds are beneficial in reducing
inflammation and blood pressure, for skin irritations and burns,
as a toxin eliminator," she says.
Sea water, say scientists, has practically the same chemical makeup
as human plasma, so the body easily absorbs the water rich with
nutrients from indigenous plants or plant matter. The applications
are multiplous. A nurse on one of her tours said that they were
starting to use laminaria as a diaphragm.
"Seaweed is not magic. It can't turn back the hands of time,"
she insists, a sensible moderate Canadian to the core. Tell that
to the thousands of customers who religiously buy Estee Lauder's
Creme de la Mer at $300 a pop.
Out of the back of Bernard's truck comes a large family of painted
and decorated rubber boots and walking sticks, and we find our
sizes and pull them on. Her seaweed tours have become famous.
Tourists and locals a like find themselves, at the crack of dawn,
happily sliding across the beach on seemingly endless beds of
squishiness, laughing like kids, and forcing themselves to eat
every slimy bit of weed Diane waves into their faces.
There are 250 varieties of seaweed on the West Coast of Canada,
and all of them are edible, says Bernard, except Desmerestis,
which will upset your stomach. In fact, says Bernard, natives still
use seaweeds as a staple of their cuisine, and early settlers
did too. But for the whites, seaweed was only eaten when you were
starving. As soon as you could afford to, you ate something, anything, else.
Shame, really, according to Bernard. Since she and the 30 formidable
West Coast chefs she works with started her experiment, they have
found eight kinds of seaweed to cook with. They have found ways
to make seaweed pesto, pastes, linguini, oil, houmous, salads,
broth, gelatins, and to replace olives in martinis. Wild foraging
on the coast has become an almost cult activity, no longer a salve
to starvation, more a tribute to the extraordinary place people
find themselves. Almost everyone, once here a few years, begin to
whisper about, for instance the morel season, and one day off they
go into the woods, returning looking annoyingly satisfied with
themselves and closemouthed about precisely where they've been.
Obediently, we crunch away at everything that Bernard hands to
us to eat. It's not bad, not bad at all. Raw seaweeds have
flavours as distinct as their various shapes, textures and
colours, ranging from nutty to sweet. Obediently again, we slide
it over our faces and arms. Slippery, slimy, nice. Converted.
