Most players in today\u2019s alt-protein sector have internalized this point. Plant-based burgers and sausages are highly evolved replacements<\/a> capable of fooling even the most discerning palates, and the number of entrants in the market grows daily. But seafood has lagged behind faux beef and chicken for a few reasons. For one, it is already considered a healthy alternative to meat, especially fish like salmon and tuna that are high in omega-3 fatty acids. \u201cDHA omega-3 is important for our brain, eye, and heart health,\u201d says nutritionist Frances Largeman-Roth. \u201cMost of us, especially vegans, are really challenged to get what they need.\u201d What\u2019s more, replicating something like a tuna steak or sushi-grade salmon is considerably harder than a ground meat analogue like a burger or sausage.<\/p>\n Yet the environmental stakes are just as high when it comes to seafood. While our love for red meat is devastating the planet and exacerbating climate change, overfishing and destructive techniques like trawling have destabilized ocean ecosystems. Over 90 percent of wild fisheries are considered overfished or at maximum capacity. Shrimp is by far the most popular seafood in the U.S., and mangrove forests, which absorb carbon dioxide<\/a> and help protect coastlines, are being cleared to make way for massive shrimp farms.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve flirted with the idea of veganism, having recently written a few articles on the subject of alt-meats and interviewed the cofounders of a seaweed protein<\/a> start-up as well as a vegan astrophysicist-turned-food scientist<\/a>. I\u2019m also intrigued by some newcomers to the marketplace \u2014 plant-based crab cakes! Vegan shrimp! Fishless fillets! Even a bluefin(less) tuna! \u2014 produced by tech companies attracting VC support and consumers seeking more responsible culinary choices.<\/p>\n But enough about all this. Are these products any good? Would it be possible to feed my family these meat-free seafood analogues for an entire week? Could I expiate guilt while shoring up our Omega-3s? I decided to give it a shot.<\/p>\n My experiment with plant-based seafood began at Orchard Grocer<\/a>, a vegan grocery and sandwich shop on Manhattan\u2019s Lower East Side. The neighborhood is steeped in immigrant history and no small amount of irony: Old-school delis peddling smoked fish and kosher meats have been edged out by hip vegan restaurants. These hotspots peddle similar fare, but instead of standard dishes prepared from animal flesh, everything is made with plant proteins and mysterious ingredients like konjac and algal oil.<\/p>\n With this in mind, I decided to pick up a couple of alt-meat sandwiches to see if the Poppy (chickpea \u201ctuna\u201d salad with the works, on marble rye) or the Marlowe (a Reuben made with beet-brined Blackbird seitan<\/a> and Violife<\/a> provolone) could pass for the real thing. As I would discover later, these items taken out of the box or pouch might\u2019ve given me pause, but when prepared by an expert they were surprisingly good. My carnivorous husband went so far as to call the Marlowe delicious with the texture of corned beef, and my Poppy was surprisingly tunalike, with a faint umami flavor complemented by a nice, chewy texture. I ordered a side of carrot lox as well, and after my initial reaction \u2014 it\u2019s just carrot! It\u2019s bullshit! \u2014 a pleasant smokiness lingered.<\/p>\n I was excited to kick off faux seafood week with vegan shrimp, because not only is the crustacean my 6-year-old\u2019s all-time favorite food, my husband is allergic to it. It also is among the most ethically dubious things you can eat in terms of environmental destruction and human rights abuses<\/a>.<\/p>\n Scampi is easy and usually a crowd-pleaser, so I set a pot of water to boil for the pasta and opened a package of vegan shrimp<\/a>. These facsimiles, made with modified starch, pea protein, and glucomannan (a dietary fiber derived from the konjac root), had an oddly rough texture and resembled nothing so much as a baker\u2019s dozen of severed fingers.<\/p>\n Uncooked shrimp are dull gray in color \u2014 only when heated do they perk up and turn pink, curling as they cook. These vegan shrimp came pink and stayed pink. They\u2019re also curled straight out of the bag. Without these visual cues, I had no idea how long to cook them. I saut\u00e9ed them for a few minutes, adding ample amounts of garlic and lemon. I found them edible and somewhat shrimpy in flavor, but their gummy worm-like texture, which slowly calcified through dinner, had an unsettling uniformity to it.<\/p>\n Adrienne Day<\/span><\/p>\n Texture is critical when creating plant-based seafoods and the hardest thing to get right, says food biotechnologist Sonia Hurtado, cofounder and chief science officer at Kuleana<\/a>, which has a bluefin tuna analogue in the pipeline. \u201cIf you want to do a cooked fish like cod, you can do it with current processing technologies, but you can\u2019t do that when you want to mimic raw flesh\u201d for something like tuna or salmon sashimi.<\/p>\n Hurtado wouldn\u2019t tell me how Kuleana approximates the texture of raw fish beyond saying \u201cenzymes and algae\u201d play into it, but she says it works. \u201cWhen we did blind taste tests, people thought our product was real bluefin tuna,\u201d she says. Kuleana, which recently raised $3 million in VC funding, plans on launching their product this year, starting with restaurants and then moving into retail stores.<\/p>\n While plant-based nigiri might turn off sushi fans, there is a growing appetite for faux fish. That might explain why Gardein\u2019s fishless filets<\/a> are seemingly ubiquitous, at least in Brooklyn \u2014 even my local deli carries them. \u201cIt\u2019s the biggest seller in the U.S. by far,\u201d says Jennifer Lamy, senior manager of the sustainable seafood initiative at the Good Food Institute. Granted that has more to do with the lack of competition than anything else. But that, too, is changing: Sophie\u2019s Kitchen<\/a> recently struck a deal<\/a> with Walmart to carry its faux crab cakes and scallops. Even a giant brand like Nestl\u00e9 is casting its line, test-marketing<\/a> its fish-free Vuna in Switzerland.<\/p>\n The goal of the alt-meat sector is to reach a flexitarian audience \u2014 the vegan-curious, if you will \u2014 and convince people that their products excel on moral, environmental, and health grounds, and can compete, cheek by jowl, with equally delicious animal proteins. \u201cYou can\u2019t overstate how important it is that these products taste good,\u201d Lamy says.<\/p>\n Monica Talbert knows how critical that is. In 2013, she and her sister teamed up with their mother to found Van Cleve Seafood<\/a>, which developed the Chesapeake blue crab pie endorsed by the likes of Oprah. But Talbert saw firsthand the human and environmental cost of the seafood industry, and in May 2020 she founded The Plant Based Seafood Co<\/a>. One of its first products was a faux crab cake so authentic that people called it the best crab cake they\u2019ve ever had, she says. Her phone started ringing with queries from around the world. \u201cIt was then that I saw the potential opportunity and the potential impact of plant-based seafood,\u201d says Talbert.<\/p>\n Baked and served with french fries and a dollop of ketchup, Gardein\u2019s filets made for a more than passable fish-and-chips dinner. It tasted much like your standard fish fillet, though the Gardein \u201cfish\u201d filling had a spongy rather than flaky quality. That didn\u2019t stop us from quickly polishing it off, though.<\/p>\n The idea of caviar without the fish eggs becomes much more palatable when you check the price of the real stuff. A 100-gram jar of Russ & Daughters<\/a>\u2019 Osetra Gueldenstaedtii<\/em> caviar will set you back about $500. The same amount will buy 72 jars of Cavi-art<\/a>, available in both black (the \u201cfancy\u201d stuff) and orange roe, the kind you often find in sushi rolls. A purist certainly won\u2019t be satisfied with the fake stuff, but the fact that roe-producing sturgeon are teetering on the brink<\/a> of extinction might soon leave them with few other options.<\/p>\n I\u2019m hardly a purist, as my experience with caviar is limited, but I found these seaweed-based analogues impressively realistic, with the tensile quality of caviar. They left a pleasing salty-umami aftertaste, though they didn\u2019t burst open and melt in the mouth quite the same way.<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t sure how to serve them \u2014 I was running low on blini and Dom Perignon \u2014so I included them on a bagel platter with Sophie\u2019s Kitchen\u2019s vegan smoked salmon<\/a> and other fixings. The vegan alternative to brined salmon had a strange rubbery quality and came out of the package soaking wet \u2014 I literally had to wring it out over the sink. And the taste didn\u2019t fool anyone. My husband took one bite and gave the rest to the cat, who didn\u2019t seem interested in it, either. It had a decently smoky flavor though, and when I sandwiched it in a bagel with the works, I was able to more or less pretend it was the real deal.<\/p>\n So far, I have to say, I was impressed by the vegan seafood I\u2019d tried. That ended with faux tuna. I really wanted to like it, especially since Good Catch<\/a> seems like a company in it for the right reasons. It also is aiming for something that competes nutritionally with heart-healthy fish. \u201cThey do this by adding algal oil to their protein base, which is made from various plant proteins,\u201d Largeman-Roth says. Algal oil, which is derived from certain marine algae, is an excellent source<\/a> of DHA omega-3. \u201cIt also gives the product a \u2018from the sea\u2019 flavor, which may or may not be to your liking,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n I cut open a pouch of Good Catch \u201cnaked\u201d fish-free tuna<\/a> and hoo-boy, did I take an instant dislike to it! I can\u2019t tell you if it was the algal oil, the product\u2019s brownish hue, or its musky odor, but neither mayo nor dill nor salt and pepper, lemon, or even sriracha could disguise its flaccid, almost-tuna qualities. A blind taste test with Bumble Bee tuna fooled no one, though my husband proclaimed the fish-free tuna \u201cgood,\u201d albeit slightly grittier than tuna \u2014 but he also eats tinned sardines (topped with yogurt!) for lunch.<\/p>\n This brings me to another issue facing some of these vegan seafoods: the \u201cuncanny valley<\/a>\u201d problem. How much should they resemble the real deal? When biting into a steak, you encounter buttery flesh, but also fat, gristle, and bone. Is this what we crave? Is a desire to strip flesh from bone while spitting out gristle somehow encoded in our DNA?<\/p>\n
\nMonday<\/strong>: Vegan Shrimp Scampi<\/h3>\n
Tuesday<\/strong>: Fish and Chips<\/h3>\n
Wednesday<\/strong>: Vegan Smoked Lox and Cavi-art<\/h3>\n
![\"Bagel](\"https:\/\/grist.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/vegan-lox-and-cavi-art.jpg?w=1200\")
Adrienne Day<\/span><\/p>\nThursday<\/strong>: Fish-Free Tuna Blind Taste Test<\/h3>\n
Friday<\/strong>: Good Catch Crabless Cakes<\/h3>\n