Nutrition, Product Development, and What Aquaculture Can Learn from Feeding Children in Southeast Asia

Dr. Frank Wieringa is co-director of the nutrition research group at IRD (the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development) and has spent over 30 years developing food-based solutions to malnutrition, primarily in Southeast Asia and Africa. Dr. Maretha Van Heerden is head of the functional food research unit at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, where she has worked on the nutritional composition of South African seaweeds, mussels, oysters, sea urchin, and abalone.This episode moves further from pure aquaculture than most, and is the better for it. Frank walks through the process of developing fish-based complementary and therapeutic foods in Cambodia, including a fish paste wafer that last year treated over 11,000 severely malnourished children with a recovery rate above 90%, and is now being scaled nationally. He also gets into the development of fish-based snacks for schoolchildren in Indonesia as a practical replacement for nutritionally empty junk food, and why catfish, not saltwater fish, turned out to be most acceptable. Marita covers the nutritional case for aquatic foods, the near-total absence of local seaweed products in South African shops despite 3,000 kilometres of coastline, and why children tested with fish oil emulsion had no problem with it at all. The conversation ends on a point both guests make independently: interdisciplinary work is not optional in this space, and research that stays in a silo goes nowhere.Made possible by LIMAQUA.