The large majority of the final product is salmon cells so I think it counts. I don't see how this is too different from fish paste products like imitation crab or chikuwa.

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mapt 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Surimi is not mostly fish, it is mostly soy, wheat, various starches. Fish (blended Alaskan pollock usually) is a minority of material in most packagings.

This came as a shock to me. The macronutrients don't lie, though. Fish is protein and a little fat, carb content is fractions of a gram, and these labels are telling me that there's more carbohydrate than protein.

The ingredient labels that the FDA allows, do find a way to lie. If you read a ten-ingredient label that says "Ingredients: Beef, wheat flour, corn flour, oats, textured vegetable protein, canola oil, vegetable oil, xanthan gum, carageenan, salt", and tell people that this is the highest-percentage ingredient to the lowest-percentage ingredient ordering, most people will assume it's >75% beef, but all the label is saying numerically is that it's >10% beef; If every other ingredient was in the 9.0 to 9.9% range then the beef input would be around 1/6th of the material. Add more ingredients and this can be manipulated even more.

I also don't think this is comparable. Blended Alaskan pollock had an immune system before it hit the cold chain.

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GloriousKoji 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I had foolishly given them the benefit of the doubt and after poking around their entire damn website site and I now hate them. I couldn't find a nutrition label but buried in text was information I need.

"4-5 grams of protein per 100 gram serving" "fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae"

Real Coho Salmon is about 20% protein and 7% fat so we're looking at less than 20% of the important parts being salmon. I retract my previous comment. It's not Salmon.

I believe the FDA defines a minimum of 40% of a meat product to be made of that meat to be labeled as that meat (eg. beef hotdogs needs to be made of 40% beef) and I'm not sure if this qualifies as that.

As a benchmark, the tuna used in a Subway tuna sandwich is 100% tuna, the beef in Taco Bell beef tacos is 88% beef, and the chicken in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets is 100% chicken but make up 45% of the nugget.

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bowmessage 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Thank you for the point about “ingredient stuffing”. I had never considered this method of deceiving consumers and will be on the lookout for it.

Why doesn’t the FDA require explicit percentages be listed..?

	▲	mapt 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		In other countries, they do. In the US, the invisible hand of the market will surely push a food producer to regulate itself effectively.

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wakawaka28 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It needs to be clearly distinguished somehow from natural product, just like other "alternative" products.

	▲	timeon 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Clear as body milk and salad with meat in it?