SeaFood for Thoughts - Photos & Plastic from Crete

Stefania Boiano
May 30, 2021
2 min read

Another stop along my journey on the island of Crete was the northwest area of Istron and the paradisiacal Voulisma Beach, not far from Agios Nikolaos.

Voulisma has that dreamlike Mediterranean beauty: fine golden sand, shallow turquoise waters, lush green hills, and rugged cliffs wrapping around the bay.The view is breathtaking at any time of the day—sunshine or clouds, morning or dusk. It’s a place that feels untouched, suspended in light.

View of Voulisma Beach from the top of the nearby hill

A view of the faraway Voulisma cost and bay with turquoise waters, hilly surrounding with a lot of trees — The View from where I stayed

Sunset over Voulisma Bay in Crete — Sunset View from where I stayed

The view at any time of the day under any weather is simply wonderful

Getting closer

But it’s when you walk slowly, barefoot, eyes down, that you start noticing what hides in plain sight. Between the sand and tiny pebbles, small, brightly coloured fragments blend in. Bits of plastic shaped by the sea into something deceptively natural. What felt like paradise from afar became unsettling up close.

I saw people walk over it and bath into it as if it wasn’t there. One woman even bent down to move a stone out of the shoreline but didn’t pause for a second at the pieces of plastic all around it. It was as if they had become part of the landscape, normalised, invisible.

Plastic and microplastic

We tend to picture microplastics only as a presence outside our body, but the reality is far more immersive:

We ingest them. A University of Newcastle meta-analysis for WWF estimates the average adult swallows ≈ 5 g of plastic each week — about the weight of a credit card. The University of Newcastle, Australia
They circulate in our blood. A 2024 Scientific Reports study found microplastic particles in nearly 90 % of sampled blood, averaging 4.2 particles / ml and correlating with altered coagulation markers. Nature
They fall from the sky. A 2020 paper in Science showed more than 1,000 t of microplastic dust rain down each year on remote U.S. national parks, confirming a global “plastic rain” cycle. Science

From sea to bloodstream to rainclouds, plastic is now a full-cycle contaminant.

SeaFood for Thoughts

Voulisma Beach inspired me this photo series: a quiet, ironic meditation on what we’re truly serving and consuming, not just through food, but through habits, through indifference, through what we choose not to see.