It turns out that all the terrible things we do to the ocean (including acidification, temperature change due to global climate change, overfishing, and plankton blooms caused by dumping phosphates) are favorable to jellyfish. Jellyfish are taking over our oceans, and there seems to be no reason why this trend won't continue at an alarming rate.
If jellyfish take over the oceanic food chain, then maybe we should start eating more jellyfish. Maybe eventually we won't have a choice! But can you even eat jellyfish? The answer is "Yes, and some people like it quite a lot, but it's what you might call an acquired taste."
Jellyfish are mostly water. Salt water, to be exact, which gives them an extremely high sodium content. Thus, the first step to eating jellyfish is to rinse the sodium out of them in a fairly labor-intensive processing stage. (And unfortunately, this processing often introduces industrial contaminants like aluminum into the jellyfish meat.)
Then you have the issue of the poison. A jellyfish's toxic sting can make you sick if you eat it. Only certain species are appropriate for eating. Even so, they must be treated by a master artisan in order to render them edible.
Aside from water and poison, jellyfish are mostly collagen. They don't have meat as most people understand it. They can be dried into a crispy snack which is analogous to pork cracklins (which are also mostly collagen). Rehydrated jellyfish has a texture similar to unflavored gelatin or Gummi Bears. However, once you remove the salt and the poison, jellyfish is fairly healthy: only 5% fat, and 80% protein.
In Japan and China, dried jellyfish is a popular snack. It is also rehydrated or served fresh as "jellyfish salad," a cold salad with a texture somewhat like a firm noodle. This blogger describes it as "a rather bland piece of sea creature with almost no identifiable taste and a rubbery, wet texture somewhat like calamari, but less interesting." Hardly the strongest endorsement, but considering the state of the oceans, maybe it's time we embrace eating jellyfish!
Image courtesy Flickr/gunnarpowers
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