If you’ve ever seen a duck floating over a pond and swallowing the vegetation that covers its surface, that bird was way ahead of its time. The vibrant green is Azolla. Azolla is a small fern that grows like crazy and doubles its biomass every two days as she conquers small bodies of water. Ducks don’t know that. Actually, who can blame it? But Azolla may soon spread throughout human civilization, becoming food for people and livestock, fertilizer for crops, and even biofuel.
“I’m not here to say that everyone should eat this right away,” says Daniel Winstead, a research engineer at Pennsylvania State University who studies azolla. “There’s a lot of work to be done. But it has so much potential.”
The main reason you don’t want to scoop Azolla out of your pond and eat it duck-style is, first of all, it sucks. But the Azolla seeds that have been studied so far are also high in polyphenols, a type of compound found in many types of plants. Polyphenols act as antioxidants in small amounts. please help me delete Certain harmful substances from the body. However, in high amounts of Azolla, polyphenols can interfere with the body’s ability to absorb nutrients. At such levels, it not only has low nutritional value; anti-Highly nutritious.
However, there is a species that does not have this drawback, the Carolina Azolla, which is native to the southeastern United States. When tested for polyphenol content, Winstead found that this Azolla had much lower levels than other species and was actually in line with the main fruits and vegetables Americans eat. . And when Winstead cooked Carolina Azolla in three different ways: fermentation, boiling, and pressure cooking, he found that the polyphenol content decreased by 62, 88, and 92 percent, respectively. (According to the chefAzolla is “crunchy and juicy” with “some earthy, metallic, mineral, mushroom, moss, and grass flavors”).
Winstead believes this may be the key to making azolla a common food around the world. “You could apply that recipe to other Asian species of Azolla,” Winstead said. Recent papers. “Then the polyphenol content will be reduced to a non-limiting level.”
Compared to other vegetables, Carolina Azolla is rich in zinc, manganese, iron, calcium, and potassium, and is also relatively rich in protein (although its content is similar to that of barley). less than grains).and it is from wild Azolla. “Wheat, rice, barley, soybeans, all of these things have been cultivated and cultivated for their nutritional and other properties,” Winstead says. “Now imagine if people did the same thing with Azolla, creating an Azolla strain that produced large amounts of precursors for biodiesel. Another one that produced large amounts of protein. You can also create things.”
Again, Winstead is not suggesting that anyone go harvest Azolla at their local pond. But with more research, Azolla could become a more widely grown crop, especially if scientists can breed it to express more nutrients. Further scrutiny is also required to ensure that the plant is not poisonous in other ways. “I think there’s a real possibility that they could be used as food in the future if extensive research is done on the toxin content of commensal cyanobacteria,” Winstead says. “Corn is currently used as biofuel, livestock feed and food products, and we think Azolla has similar potential.”
