Source: http://luckypeach.com/a-little-kelp-from...

By practically all accounts, the Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company, founded in 1980, was California’s first commercial seaweed operation. It’s based in Philo, nineteen miles inland, far enough from the sea for the hot sun to dry the seaweed. John and Barbara Lewallen live there in a house without walls. Barbara took the walls out when John found himself unable to walk: the diagnosis was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A tumor had wrapped itself around his spinal cord, and suddenly he was paraplegic. The doctors said he’d never be able to walk again, but John can walk now. (“We like to joke that we don’t know if it was the green tea, the seaweed, or the pot,” Barbara says.)

The plan, at first, was to be a lawyer. John went to Stanford Law School for a year, dropped out, headed to Vietnam to volunteer in the war — “refugee relief kind of thing” — and “when I came back from that I was all whacked out,” John says. (He and Barbara think it was his exposure to Agent Orange there that caused the lymphoma.) “So I came here and started backpacking seaweed off the beach. Now it has become my spiritual path.”