As I looked at the childhood pictures of when I was about 10 years old I see as of then, and get every time, a tremendous surge of happiness. I had an idyllic life and feel there are some truths to share as to what was the source of my happiness.

My family, like the other families in my village, grew and harvested most of our own food. People came from the city to buy what we didn't need for our own use, but my own food was often the product of my own personal labor.

Some of that food was mostly a family affair, not just a personal project of my own. Such was the case for one of the staple foods in my family diet -- called "kim" in Korean.

"Kim" is an edible seaweed that grows in the oceans all over the world. It is known by different names, of course, in other areas. There is an extensive background about kim at Footnote1 and Footnote2.

Actually kim grew in the ocean as a wild seaweed and could be harvested even without any special "farming" activity. But down through the centuries and millennia, people found that they could use farming techniques to "plant" and "grow" kim. Kim grows naturally on rocks in the shallow ocean water, but it is not difficult to introduce farming techniques which increase the production or make it easier to harvest and to adapt the farming to the local conditions.

The mental picture on this was crystal clear to me. I helped my mother and father every day to tend to our kim farm. The work we did depended on the time of year and the times of the ocean tides that made the kim farm sometimes in shallow water and sometimes in deeper water.

Our basic farming procedure was to take something like bamboo shoots or even rope, tie a stone to the bottom of it, attach some pieces of kim from an existing plant in the ocean and place them in the shallow water where the tides would come in and out, providing motion of the water and proper depth so that we could wade out, place the stone-bottomed stick (or rope) in a place where the pieces of new kim would be bathed in sunlight and water -- and grow.

Harvesting is done almost any time but mostly during the winter months and usually about 40 days after initial planting has taken place. The algae looks red in the water but dries to a deep green color as it is eaten and known by most people. The image on the right is the familiar "kim" as consumed in Korea.

One of my special jobs was washing the seaweed to remove sand and salt. The difference between high quality kim and cheap kim was often found in the care taken to wash the leaves and leave only the clean and pure leaf.

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