Finally Coming Home: Ocean Forager Roushanna Gray's Culinary Journey Through South African Tidepools

Jason Elias: 0:08

Hi and welcome to the Big Deep podcast. Big Deep is a podcast about people who have a connection to the ocean, people for whom that connection is so strong it defines some aspect of their life. Over the course of this series we'll talk to all sorts of people and in each episode we'll explore the deeper meaning of that connection. Today I speak with an edible landscape forager from South Africa whose unique passion is wild indigenous seaweed along the rocky intertidal coast of Africa. Hello, this is your host, jason Elias. Welcome to the Big Deep podcast. In today's episode I speak with South African edible landscape forager Roshanna Gray. When I first heard of Roshanna's unique take on eating from the wild landscape, i was intrigued, particularly as it related to her deep dive literally into the seaweed off her local coast in Cape Town. Roshanna's initial foraging for edible wildfires in the spring and mushrooms in the forest in the winter was so different from the way I usually view my relationship with the environment. I was almost shocked you could do this before I recognized how fundamental that way of eating once was. And, of course, i was interested in the ocean aspect and her foraging with the over 900 edible seaweeds found in South Africa's intertidal rock pools. But, maybe unsurprisingly, what came out of our interview that was of interest to me was less about what she did and more about why she did it, and I found her way of talking and relating to the ocean to verge on the magical and it was exhilarating. And this view has now led Roshanna to teaching this way of foraging and cooking with the edible landscape around her through her immersive culinary school. Veld and Sea. And when we did our interview, roshanna spoke openly about the journey to having her eyes open to the edible landscape in the sea around her, what it meant to have your passion for the ocean connect with discovering a sense of purpose in her own life and a largely unremarkable free dive in South Africa that ultimately unloved the mysteries of the ocean for her.

Roushanna Gray: 2:16

My name is Roushanna Gray. I am in Cape Point, Cape Town, South Africa, and I am a foraging teacher and a very curious foodie with a love of exploring and tasting our edible landscape.

Jason Elias: 2:31

So, Roshanna, you mentioned before our interview that growing up in South Africa it was hard to not have a connection to the ocean. Can you talk a bit about that and when you first remember your connection to the water?

Roushanna Gray: 2:44

Well, if you grew up in Cape Town, it's hard not to be connected to the ocean because we are so beautifully situated. We've got the warm Indian Ocean up the east and we've got the lovely freezing cold Atlantic Ocean on the west. And personally, i grew up having many adventures along the coastline. My father and my mother's side of the family were all recreational fishers, and so I spent many an hour on the harbor walls, mostly for catching calamari, usually in the evening under a light, so the lights glistening on the surface of the sea and attracting these calamari, and so there's many memories of sitting on the harbor wall as a child with a picnic, listening to the ocean coming through the little cracks very special memories.

Jason Elias: 3:38

I'm sure those were special times and I know you still live near Cape Town, this huge metropolis, but I also know it is still fairly wild and raw where you live in Cape Point, about an hour outside of town. Can you talk a bit about that landscape and did that play any part in your journey of discovery with Edible Seaweed?

Roushanna Gray: 4:00

It's not that far away from the busy city life hub of Cape Town, but it's very elemental out here. So I'd already been working with edible plants growing in the wild in the land in winter time. In springtime there's edible flowers and in autumn it was the wild mushrooms growing in the forest. But in summer time here it's almost a dormant season, because it is very hot, there's a prevailing southeaster wind that blows, really drying up the vegetation even more, so, in terms of foraging it's quite difficult to find something juicy and delicious. So there was this missing puzzle piece, until this amazing human called Hiromu Jimbo, a Japanese traveler, came to visit us. He had been travelling on his bike, zigzagged his way up from Istanbul all the way down Africa, and he ended up knocking on our door and asking if he could come. He had such an extraordinary story and he had been travelling for three and a half years. So of course we let him stay and his three night stay turned into three months And every now and again he would hop on his bike with a little bucket at the back and he would cycle off to the nearest beach and he'd come back and shortly afterwards there'd be these delicious cockling smells coming from his campsites. So one day I went down with him to the intertidal zone and he just looked over the coastline with me And there are so many sea vegetables here. He couldn't understand why nobody was eating them. There was such a delicacy where he was from, in Japan. So this really opened my mind and my curiosity was awakened And I just wanted to learn as much as I could about this new edible landscape, this old edible landscape.

Jason Elias: 5:58

Yeah, it's so interesting how, sometimes, ideas that seem so fresh and new are simply reconnecting us back to the wisdom of people who lived before us, and yet with that, we can take those ideas and learn new ways of moving forward. And so I guess my question to you is has this way of foraging for edible seaweed changed your relationship to the ocean?

Roushanna Gray: 6:23

It definitely has. If anybody had told me what I'd be doing now, back when I first started, i would have thought they were completely crazy. And at first started out as a hobby. I wanted to learn more about seaweeds. There wasn't a course that I could do, so I decided to create one myself and that meant a long, slow journey of learning in nature. And I'm still on this path of learning And I think it's that magic place where, when something you are so passionate about connects with your sense of purpose in life, anything is possible. When you first go down to the rock pools and you look over the intertidal zone, it's what I call seaweed blindness. You kind of just see a lot of the same colour, there's maybe a difference in texture, but you don't really know what you're looking at. But if you creep a little closer, maybe get down on your hands and knees and you start to really look closely at the different colours and textures, tastes, even Learn a little about their culinary applications and their medicinal properties, learn about the ecosystem surrounding it. You're never going to walk through that space in the same way again And it almost changes your senses. You don't just walk through there visually, you walk through there with a flavour palette running through your mind. So it's not just about foraging, it's more about creating awareness of how incredible and how special our oceans are, and when you learn this knowledge, you are more likely to want to protect and preserve the areas, and it's a great step in nurturing custodianship of the oceans. Yeah, it's beautiful. We can take a lot of life lessons from being in the ocean.

Jason Elias: 9:27

Oh, i agree with that And it's the primary reason I started this podcast. It's really about people who have been changed by their connection to the ocean, and I think your story epitomizes that in some ways. But I think something else unique about your story is because you look for the edible aspects of the ocean, like the relationship a farmer might have with their land. I suspect you have a deeper connection to the changing energies of the ocean over the year And I'm wondering if you find there are different characteristics of the ocean in the different seasons of the year And, if so, how does that guide your relationship to foraging for seaweed?

Roushanna Gray: 10:09

In the rock pools. There's lots of different seaweeds. In South Africa we're really lucky. We have just over 900 different species of seaweed And out of all of those 900, there's only one that you can't eat. There are obviously choice edibles. There's a lot of very delicious seaweeds And the flavor is very different. You kind of have to think of sea vegetables just like land vegetables. Each one has their own flavor, their own season, their own texture, And it's this reciprocal relationship that we start to form with the ocean when we are in this place. Right, I mean just by being physically in the rock pools. We are having a reciprocal relationship, whether you realize it or not. And to access this intertidal zone and to witness these things on a macro level, you have to work on an even bigger scale. So in wintertime it's very elemental and very wild and powerful, but from an energy coming outside of the ocean, not inside. So the outside elements are creating this force within the ocean. In autumntime there's still a little bit of a dormancy within the intertidal zone. In springtime We get the seaweeds that grow once a year. So, like a lot of the land plants, there's quite an energy shift within the rock pools. There's an excitement and there's a growth spurt. It's like the feeling that you feel on land in springtime, when all these beautiful little flowers start blossoming and blooming and new leaf growth happens. A lot of this stuff is happening in the intertidal zone as well. In summertime, the seaweeds have grown and there's abundance, And when seaweeds are at the beginning of summer, they are at their most nutrient rich And so the coastal garden is full of sea vegetables. So summertime has a lot of energy and life force within the ocean, And summer is the time that we go coastal foraging in the intertidal zone. So once you dive into the delicious world of seaweeds, it's quite exciting from a foodie perspective, because there's so much you can do.

Jason Elias: 12:30

Yeah it's just such a different way of connecting to the ocean and I find something deeply rooted in that. Now, you mentioned, before we started our interview, there was one free dive. You did a dive that was unremarkable in almost every way, and yet something shifted for you on that dive. Can you tell us the story of that dive and why it meant so much to you?

Roushanna Gray: 12:53

There's many magical epiphany moments that happen when you connect with the ocean, but I think a story that I haven't really told is my relationship with being underwater. For ever I have been terrified of being underwater and felt like I needed to connect a little bit more deeply to explore the cup forests. So I decided to go on a free diving course. But even after the course and after going into the ocean a couple of times with my free diving buddy, i was terrified. I didn't want to go too far out, but the ocean rewards familiarity. And after going for quite a few dives in quite a few different locations over a few years actually It was this one day and it was very unremarkable at a lovely little place called Winmell Beach, very easy beach entry, you can just walk straight into the ocean from the beach And the kelp glistening at the surface of the sea and all these beautiful different colours and the sunlight just glistening on the surface And it's just absolutely beautiful underwater there. Going underwater there is like entering into rainbow coloured out of space underwater worlds. There's so many different colours and textures, with these beautiful big fans just floating with the current, and the silence, the beautiful silence when you're underwater, just the little crickling crackling of the reef. Yeah, it's something very special. But something happened where I was underwater and something clicked. I was comfortable and relaxed And I could hold my breath that much longer and start to look around and see what was there. And for me that was a pivotal point. That was my change. It was a feeling in my mind and in my heart and in my body. It was an expansive feeling. It was a feeling of belonging, a feeling of excitement and joy. I was really proud of myself for having gone through this whole process, from being frozen in fear to pushing through that barrier, through the power of knowledge and through the repetition of visiting the ocean again and again and again, until she let me in. Yeah, it was like coming home.

Jason Elias: 16:41

Finally, we end every interview and every episode with a single open-ended question. we ask everyone we talk to What does the ocean mean to you?

Roushanna Gray: 16:52

Sure, that's a beautiful question. The ocean is a very healing space. It can hold memory, it carries stories and heritage and it offers freedom and hope and nourishment and happiness.

Jason Elias: 17:15

Thanks for listening to the Big Deep podcast Next time on Big Deep. We really appreciate you being on this journey into the Big Deep as we explore an ocean of stories. If you like what we're doing, please make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, please like and comment, because those subscribes, likes and comments really make a difference For more interviews, deeper discussions with our guests, photos and updates on anything you've heard. There's a lot more content at our website, BigDeepcom Plus. If you know someone we should think we should talk to, let us know at our Big Deep website, as we are always looking to hear more stories from interesting people who are deeply connected to our world's oceans. Thanks again for joining us.