Irish Moss

You've consumed products containing carrageenan today—probably multiple times—without knowing it. Ice cream, chocolate milk, yogurt, deli meat, toothpaste, pet food, infant formula: all stabilized by an extract from a red seaweed that once served as famine food for starving Irish peasants. Irish moss demonstrates how marginal survival resources can become invisible infrastructure.

During the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852), coastal communities turned to Chondrus crispus when crops failed. The seaweed provided basic nutrition and could be gathered from rocky shores at low tide. What began as desperate survival food evolved into an industrial ingredient when food scientists discovered its remarkable gelling and thickening properties.

Carrageenan—the polysaccharide comprising 55% of Irish moss's dry weight—is now a multi-billion dollar industry producing over 60,000 tons annually. The compound functions as an invisible infrastructure layer: customers buying chocolate milk don't know carrageenan keeps cocoa particles suspended; ice cream consumers don't realize it prevents ice crystal formation; meat processors rely on it to retain moisture in deli products.

This maps to platform infrastructure businesses. AWS started as internal tooling for Amazon's retail operations—the digital equivalent of gathering seaweed to survive. Engineers needed computing infrastructure, so they built it. The marginal resource became a platform when Amazon realized others needed the same infrastructure. AWS now generates over $90 billion in annual revenue while remaining invisible to end users.

The FDA classifies carrageenan as 'generally recognized as safe.' The European Food Safety Authority found 'no evidence of any adverse effects in humans.' Yet periodic health controversies create market volatility—just as platform infrastructure faces periodic trust crises. The lesson: invisible infrastructure becomes visible only during disruptions.

Three types of carrageenan serve different functions: Kappa forms rigid gels with potassium (used in desserts), Iota forms soft gels with calcium (used in cosmetics), Lambda doesn't gel but thickens (used in dairy). This specialization mirrors how platform services differentiate: compute, storage, and networking serve distinct needs while sharing underlying infrastructure.

Sea moss sales doubled from $19.5 million in 2024 to $53.3 million in 2025, driven by TikTok's 1.5 billion #seamoss views. The famine food is becoming a wellness trend—the same trajectory from marginal to mainstream, but compressed into months rather than centuries.

Irish moss thrives in the intertidal zone—alternately submerged and exposed—surviving conditions that would kill most organisms. This extreme-survival origin may explain why its extract functions so well as a stabilizer: molecules evolved for harsh conditions create stability for products that otherwise couldn't exist. The parallel: infrastructure built for survival conditions (AWS's scale requirements, TSMC's precision demands) creates capabilities that enable products the original builders never imagined.