The day I met Alanna Kieffer was gloriously sunny with a gentle salt breeze—a rarity on Oregon’s rainy coast. It was my first time at Cannon Beach, but Kieffer seemed completely at ease as she led me across the soft, pale sand to a cluster of dark, rugged rocks at the ocean’s edge. A coastal forager and educator, this stretch of Pacific coastline is her office, classroom, kitchen, and inspiration for her company, Tide change.
Kieffer founded Shifting Tides in February 2023 to teach people about intertidal ecosystems — the unique spaces where the ocean meets land, changing hourly as the tides rise and fall — and how they impact our daily lives, especially when it comes to what we eat.
Alanna Kieffer stir-frying seaweed on a portable grill just metres from where we harvested. Photo by Elena Valeriote
Kieffer takes visitors on a tour of the Oregon coast, where she harvests and then prepares a meal of wild seaweed and shellfish right on the beach. I previously obtained a state permit for harvesting rights. with she—rather than just watching—so, after she demonstrated the proper technique, I was handed a small knife and together we worked to carefully remove mussels and gooseneck oysters from a large triangular rock slick with saltwater. Kieffer’s enthusiasm radiated as she dispensed advice and information, but it was the bright neon green seaweed that really made her shine.
Harvesting wild mussels. Photo by Elena Valeriote
“In Oregon, the seaweed harvest season is March through June 15, with a limit of one gallon bag of seaweed per day and only three bags per year,” Kieffer said. “The regulations are such that you have to use a knife or scissors to remove the seaweed, and it is actually illegal to pull the anchors, or root-like anchors, off rocks. This allows them to grow back year after year. They regenerate quickly, but we should never harvest everything a given area has and should leave a lot intact for wildlife to use.”
Kieffer holds freshly picked seaweed. Photo by Elena Valeriote
Seaweed is a key component of what Kieffer considers “climate cuisine,” which includes foraged and farmed foods that have a positive impact on our climate. A prime example is the wild kelp pickles she makes and serves to her Shifting Tides participants, which are tart, spicy, and crunchy. Participants also get the chance to try dulse seaweed, which she farms and fries in olive oil for a wonderfully salty, crunchy snack. During my tour, I sampled dulse before and after Kieffer cooked it, and I also enjoyed it raw—it was lightly salty and slightly chewy; reminiscent of the sea, but not too dissimilar to terrestrial leafy greens. Given the versatility of this particular seaweed, she uses it in and on all sorts of foods, including homemade pasta, vegan Caesar salad dressing, and every bagel condiment imaginable.
Seaweed is a major focus of Kieffer’s work as an educator, forager, and farmer. When not leading Shifting Tides tours, Kieffer works as part of a small team at Oregon Seaweeda local seaweed farm, where she has been helping grow a type of seaweed called Pacific Dulse since 2021. Much of their seaweed is sold fresh (about $15 a pound) or dried to nearby restaurants and home chefs, but it also ships worldwide. As the trend toward plant-based and environmentally conscious foods becomes more mainstream, Oregon Seaweed is well-positioned to meet the growing demand in the global seaweed market, which is valued at more than $150 million.17 billion by 2023 and is expected to double in the next decade.
“One of the things I love about both of my jobs is that no two days in a week are the same,” Kieffer says. “With Oregon Seaweed, some days I’m out on the farm all day, cleaning tanks, drying, and packaging seaweed; other days I’m at the restaurant teaching chefs how to cook dulse, or at the market talking to customers about it; other days I’m at my computer all day answering emails or processing online sales. Same with Shifting Tides—lots of time spent out at low tide teaching people and cooking with people.”
“Alanna’s passion for the ocean is infectious,” says Maggie Michaels, who recently joined one of her tours. “The tour is like an accessible mini-Marine Biology class, where you explore a creature and learn how it fits into the context of its environment.” Photo by Elena Valeriote
Kieffer’s schedule changes depending on both the tides and the tourist season. When the weather is good, she might schedule 10 consecutive days of tours and a workshop every weekend. Each of her roles has its own responsibilities, but there are clear boundaries between them.
“Because seaweed is such an uncommon food in our culture, a big part of my work with seaweed is educating people on how and why to use seaweed,” Kieffer says. “The topic of eating seaweed is a stepping stone to a lot of other great conservation efforts around food.
“Regenerative aquaculture is about giving back to the environment, rather than taking away, or having a neutral impact on the environment, and requires little or no input to grow food,” Kieffer explains. “For example, seaweed requires sunlight and natural nutrients; no freshwater, herbicides or pesticides are needed. They remove carbon dioxide from the water through photosynthesis as well as excess nutrients such as nitrogen, which can have a positive impact on local ecosystems.”
For example, the dulse seaweed that Kieffer grows at Oregon Seaweed is capable of sequestering one pound of carbon for every four pounds of seaweed grown. In the wild, Kieffer harvests about 10 different types of seaweed, including nori, kombu, wakame, sugar kelp, pepper dulse, and sea spaghetti. Some of these will be familiar to sushi lovers, but few people know where to buy individual seaweed, let alone what it looks like in its natural form.
“She brings this mysterious underwater world to life,” said Duncan Berry, a Shifting Tides tour participant. Kieffer is “a force of nature, a true optimist, steeped in the wild…a living expression of the coast.” Photo by Elena Valeriote
As comfortable as she was as she navigated the hidden corners of Cannon Beach, I was surprised to learn that this was not Kieffer’s native habitat. She was born in New York City and moved to Oregon as a teenager. Soon after, she began working for an environmental education company in intertidal ecosystems. She fell in love with the place.
“I grew up in a family of chefs, restaurateurs, cookbook editors, and general food lovers, so I was born with a deep connection to food whether I realized it or not,” Kieffer says. “Once I moved to the beach, I moved away from food service and started working next to our ocean. I learned a lot about the food system and ultimately what it takes to get food from the ocean to our plates.”
The rock and tide pools where Kieffer forages for barnacles, muscles and seaweed for his afternoon meal. Photo by Elena Valeriote
When I arrived at Cannon Beach, Kieffer pointed out starfish smaller than my thumbnail that had been sucked into shells clinging to rocks around the tide pools. She told me about gobies (narrow fish with wide mouths) that live among the seaweed and camouflage themselves to match their green color.
Since founding Shifting Tides a little over a year ago, Kieffer has been exploring the Pacific Northwest ecosystem with people of all ages from all over the country. “At first, it was mostly Oregonians. Now, by partnering with a number of hotels on the coast as well as destination management organizations, like Travel Oregon and the Oregon Coast Visitors Association, I’ve taught a lot of people who aren’t from the region—college students from Wyoming, executive teams from Tennessee, couples from Texas.”
While travelers may not have access to exactly wild seafood when they return home, they will gain an understanding of how regenerative food systems can be applied anywhere.
“There are so many people working hard to bring food from the sea to our tables in a sustainable way that benefits coastal communities,” Kieffer said. “Telling the stories of people, customs, science and conservation along our coasts over a meal with foraged and farmed seaweed is truly a dream.”
Kieffer’s dream is the reality we need. As I watched her stir-fry seaweed on a portable seafoam green grill just yards from where we harvested, I felt a kind of hope rarer than a blue-sky day in Oregon. There is no simple, single solution to our food system, but Shifting Tides shows us the valuable work that is already being done, and invites us to join in.
Pickled kelp on the Oregon coast. Photo by Elena Valeriote
