At the very foundation of the food chain and directly responsible for about 80 percent of the world's oxygen, algae are found in every drop of water and every inch of fertile soil, transforming the minerals, gases and sunlight of our environment into viable foods for all other species of life.

They are in every sense the true biological foundation of life on Earth.

Algae are classified by color, which is an indication of their nutrient spectrum and their capacity to absorb different spectra of light waves - in other words, their color shows their particular "sunshine diet." These families include blue-green, green, red, brown, golden and other algae. Blue-green algae are the most ancient of the many thousands of species of ocean and fresh water algae.

Among all the algae families, blue-green algae are the most efficient in photosynthesis, making them particularly critical to maintaining a balanced and life-sustaining food chain and atmosphere. Their photosynthetic prowess also makes them the most chlorophyll-rich organisms on the planet.

Blue green algae also are unique among algae in that they possess the characteristics of all three kingdoms of life - plant, animal and bacteria.

Algae have been used as vital staple foods in human dietary traditions throughout the world. Most well known are the many ocean algae, commonly called "seaweeds" or "sea vegetables" (though they are neither weeds nor vegetables:) traditionally eaten by coastal peoples of both the East and West.

Freshwater algae also formed an important part of many culinary traditions, such as in parts of Africa and Central America. The Kanembu natives of the Lake Chad region in Africa have traditionally harvested and eaten blue-green algae, using a processing method similar to that used by the Aztec civilization to remove Spirulina from Lake Texcoco.

The algae is gathered from the lake in porous cloth bags and allowed to drain. It is then formed into large flat cakes on the sand and dried in the sun. As the blue-green algae gels, it is smoothed by hand and marked off into squares. When most of the water has evaporated or seeped into the sand, the squares are pulled up, dried further on mats and cut into brittle cakes.

The Kanembu then eat the algae, which is called dihe, after it is cooked in a sauce of tomatoes, chili peppers and various spices; the algae sauce is then poured over millet. Unfortunately, much of the chlorophyll and other factors are lost by the hot sun, sand drying and cooking.

Seaweeds have been used in modern food processing and as a natural food staple for many decades; yet it has been only since the 1970's that the extraordinary health and dietary value of freshwater algae has been "rediscovered", first with Chlorella (a green microalgae) in the early 1970s and then with Spirulina (a blue-green microalgae) in the later 1970s.

However, unlike the case with seaweeds, by the time we had stumbled upon this most ancient miracle, all of the viable natural sources for harvesting freshwater algae were either too polluted or too ravaged by drought to serve any purpose. Thus, freshwater algae consumption on any major scale required man-made cultivation.

Then, in the early 1980s, a single researcher discovered one overlooked, solitary source for the most remarkable blue-green algae of all, aphanizomenon flos-aquae - and he found it growing organically and abundantly in the wild, within the United States, in an environment that is pristine and unpolluted - and, in fact, is the richest biomass producer on the planet.

The environment was Upper Klamath Lake; the researcher, Daryl Kollman, the founder of Cell Tech, International.