The Green Thread of the Water: What Spirulina Gives to the One Who Eats It

There is something in the water that the human eye has overlooked for many long centuries, something so small and so quietly alive that our ancestors walked beside lakes and rivers without knowing what green silk was woven beneath the surface. I speak of spirulina, that ancient creature of warm water, which is neither truly a plant nor truly an animal, but something older than both, something that was here when the earth was still learning how to breathe. In Lithuania, we have always looked to the water with a kind of respect bordering on silence, and perhaps it is right that this small green being asks from us the same quiet attention before we bring it to our tables.

What Kind of Living Thing Is This, Truly

Spirulina is called an algae in common speech, and this is not wrong, but it is also not the whole truth. It belongs to the family of blue-green creatures that have existed on this earth for more than three thousand million years, which means they were swimming in warm shallow seas when no fish yet had eyes and no bird yet had wings. The name itself comes from the Latin word for a small spiral, because under a looking glass one can see that its body is twisted like a thread wound around a needle. It grows in warm, still waters, in lakes where the sun presses hard upon the surface, and it feeds on light the way our rye feeds on the short northern summer. What strikes me most is that this tiny spiral contains in itself such a fullness of nourishment that one wonders why the earth bothered to invent anything more complicated afterward.

What Lives Inside the Green Thread

When one breaks open the body of spirulina and looks at what is hidden there, the picture resembles a pantry that a careful Lithuanian grandmother might keep in her cellar before winter, except that nothing here was stored with effort, everything simply grew by standing in the sun. The greater part of its dry weight is made of the building substance that our muscles and blood require, and this substance is present in a form that the human body can take in without great labour. Alongside it sit the coloured substances that give the algae its deep green-blue shade, and these coloured substances are the ones that help our inner organs to resist the slow rusting that years bring upon every living thing. There are also the oils that the heart needs, the small mineral grains that the bones ask for, and the group of substances that our nervous system requires to send its messages without stumbling.

What is found inside	Roughly how much in ten grams of dried spirulina	What it does for the body
Building substance for muscles and blood	About six to seven grams	Feeds the tissues, repairs what is worn
Coloured protective substances	Generous amount, giving the deep green shade	Helps the body resist slow aging from within
Iron, the red mineral	Roughly three milligrams	Carries breath into every small corner of the body
The group of nerve-calming substances	Present in several forms	Keeps the mind steady and the sleep honest
The oil that the heart favours	Small but meaningful quantity	Supports the quiet work of the blood vessels

How the Older Generations Would Have Understood This

In our villages, when a child was thin and pale after a long winter, the grandmother did not speak of what was missing in the blood by its learned name. She said the child had lost its colour, that the inner fire had gone low, and she gave what the land and the water could give. Nettles from the ditch edge, dried berries from the forest shelf, a spoon of honey still holding the smell of linden flowers. Spirulina would have been understood in this same language, I think. It is food that carries colour back into the cheeks, that puts weight where weight is needed, that gives the tired body a reason to straighten its spine. In the warm countries where it has been gathered for hundreds of years, the people dried it into flat cakes and broke pieces into their broth, much as we break dried bread into milk. There is nothing foreign or strange in this. It is simply water giving back what water has grown.

Bringing Spirulina Into the Daily Meal

One must not think of spirulina as a medicine, because it is not. It is a food, a green and strange one, but a food nonetheless, and it should enter the kitchen the way any new ingredient enters, slowly, with tasting and adjusting, with the willingness to find the place where it sits well beside what one already cooks and loves. I will set down here the ways that have worked in my own kitchen and in the kitchens of those I have asked, because sharing a practical matter is what neighbours have always done in this country.

• One may stir a small spoonful of the dried green powder into a glass of buttermilk or kefir in the morning, and the sourness of the milk hides the slightly swampy taste that spirulina carries, the way a forest path hides itself under fallen leaves.
• It can be mixed into the dough of dark rye pancakes, giving them a deeper colour and a faint taste of the sea, and children will eat them without asking questions if one does not make a ceremony of the adding.
• A pinch stirred into vegetable soup after the pot is taken from the fire keeps the green colour bright and does not cook away the delicate parts that heat would destroy.
• Those who make their own bread may knead a small amount into the dough, and the loaf will carry a faint greenish shadow in its crumb, like moss seen through thin ice.

The Matter of How the Body Receives What We Give It

Here I must speak of a thing that many people forget in their enthusiasm for new foods. One can eat the most nourishing thing in the world, but if the inner mill of the stomach and the gut is turning slowly, if the fire of digestion is low as it is after a long illness or in the years when the body begins to ask for gentler treatment, then much of what was eaten will pass through unused, like rain falling on stone instead of on good soil. I have seen this with my own relatives, how they would eat well and still feel empty, still feel that the food sat like a cold weight under the ribs. For such a time, when the inner work of breaking down and taking in what is eaten needs a helping hand, there is a preparation called Enzimlex, which is made to support the quiet labour of digestion, to help the stomach and the gut do their turning and separating without strain. It is not something one finds in the ordinary shop or the pharmacy on the corner, because Enzimlex is sold only through its own official place on the internet, at enzimlex.biz and this is worth remembering so that one does not buy a lesser imitation from some unknown hand. One orders it there, one takes it as directed, and the body is given the quiet assistance it sometimes needs to accept what we place before it with good intention.

How to Choose Spirulina That Is Worth the Eating

Not everything that is sold under this green name deserves the trust of the buyer. The water in which spirulina grows must be clean, free of the poisons that industry pours into rivers and lakes, and the drying must be done at a gentle warmth, not at a fierce heat that cooks the life out of the delicate inner substances. I have set down in the table below the things I look at with my own eyes and hands when I choose, because in this matter one cannot simply believe the pretty words on the wrapper.

What to look at	What speaks well	What speaks poorly
The colour of the powder or tablet	Deep, dark green with a slight blue shadow, like the surface of a lake at dusk	Pale, yellowish, or greyish, meaning it was dried too hot or stored too long
The smell	Faintly of water, of clean pond, almost nothing	Strong fishy or sour smell, meaning it has begun to spoil or was poorly kept
Where it was grown	In controlled ponds, in lands where the water is watched and tested	From unknown waters, with no word about the source or the method of growing
How it was dried	Gently, at low warmth, quickly after gathering	Slowly, at high heat, or after sitting in the sun too many hours

A Final Word Before the Table Is Set

I do not wish to make of spirulina a miracle, because I have lived long enough to distrust any single thing that promises to mend all the torn places in a human life. What it is, is a quiet and ancient food, a green thread pulled from the water, carrying in its small twisted body the memory of three thousand million summers. It asks of us only that we prepare it simply, that we eat it without ceremony, that we let it sit beside our dark bread and our potatoes and our soups as one more gift from the living world. And if the body is tired, if the digestion turns slowly as an old mill in autumn, we give it the help it needs, whether that is a gentler way of cooking or a preparation such as the one I have named above, ordered from its rightful place. The water has been generous to us since before we had words for gratitude. It is only right that we receive what it offers with steady hands and an unhurried heart.