When you enter a seafood expo, you anticipate seeing the usual suspects: shiny salmon fillets, piles of shrimp on ice, and a few scallop vendors trying their hardest to compete. You don’t anticipate receiving something from a Taiwanese business that actually tastes like chicken tender. However, that is precisely what transpired at the Seafood Expo North America in Boston this past March, and it reveals something both unsettling and intriguing about the current state of American food culture.
Salmon is not the trend. It’s not shrimp, which for decades has been the go-to seafood for Americans. Making fish completely vanish into forms that don’t even resemble fish in terms of appearance, flavor, or smell is currently the fastest-growing trend in the seafood industry. meatballs made with tuna. burgers with shrimp. Sticks of salmon that taste more like a Slim Jim from a gas station than anything you would get from the ocean. It’s important to consider why chefs and food developers are putting so much effort into this.
The answer is embarrassingly straightforward in part. Despite claiming to love a good meal and being surrounded by coastline, Americans consume roughly 19 pounds of seafood annually. In a hundred years, that figure has hardly changed. The average weight worldwide is forty-five pounds. Iceland, which may have less to prove in terms of cuisine, weighs about 200 pounds. Indeed, there is a gap, and the seafood industry has been staring at it for years, attempting to understand what it means.
It seems to indicate that Americans are more terrified of the taste of the ocean than they are of the ocean itself. The visual cue that something with scales was involved, the fishy smell, and the texture that doesn’t behave like a burger or nugget. This explains why businesses like Los Angeles-based SK Food Brands began creating shrimp burgers as a calculated entry point rather than as a novelty. One of their sales managers remarked, “It makes it more palatable to people who aren’t big seafood fans,” while standing next to a display of shrimp patties the size of sliders. He didn’t sound sorry for it. He sounded like someone who had discovered something.
Observing all of this, it seems like the seafood industry is essentially doing what the plant-based meat industry tried a few years ago: meeting skeptical customers where they already are. Until they like it, pretend. To be fair, the reasoning isn’t absurd because it worked, at least in part, for oat milk and the Impossible Burger.
The technical challenge hidden within this trend is particularly intriguing to chefs. It takes true culinary engineering—texture manipulation, seasoning control, and moisture management—to get tuna to behave like fried chicken. It’s more about translating seafood into a different language than it is about demeaning it. Not all of the chefs who are drawn to these products do so voluntarily. The canvas is actually new, which is why they are doing it.
Whether this strategy will significantly change that 19-pound annual figure is still up in the air. A national seafood awakening was not exactly sparked by the decades-long existence of frozen fish sticks. However, the products that are currently being developed have a different ambition; they are not only made to conceal fish but also to directly compete with the foods that Americans already adore and eat without hesitation. You’re not being asked to make a compromise when a shrimp burger is positioned next to a beef burger. You are being asked to make a decision.
It remains to be seen if Americans will genuinely do so. However, the industry appears to sincerely think that the answer might be yes for the first time in a long time.
