The seafood industry is trying to tackle a slippery problem: the US has never developed a taste for fish. Americans will eat canned cheese product and put marshmallow “fluff” on their sandwiches, but they seem to balk at eating fish. The average American consumes about 19lb (under 9kg) of the stuff a year, while the global average is 45lb. Over in Iceland, they’re really getting their omega-3s in: they lead the world with around 200lb of seafood a year.
Still, the tide may be turning: Big Fish has come up with a cunning plan to crack the US market. You know how there are sneaky ways of hiding veggies in recipes for picky toddlers? That’s basically the strategy. Except instead of hiding spinach in a chocolate pancake, the plan is to make fish look like meat. Think tuna that looks like chicken nuggets and salmon sticks that look like beef jerky. It’s not quite fake meat – it’s Fishy Meat™. Yum.
Obviously, this isn’t a completely new idea: plant-based meat really went mainstream when it was put in the meat department, rather than the “vegetarian” aisle. And fish-as-meat marketing, in the guise of tuna steaks and salmon burgers, has been around for a while. However, according to recent AP reporting from the Seafood Expo circuit (one of the coolest places to see and be seen), it looks like the surreptitious seafood trend has really started to take off.
Honestly, I can see why. The strategy is sound; unlike (most) fish, the idea has legs. Whether it’s good for the environment for the 348 million people in the US to suddenly up their seafood consumption, however, is a whole other question. And not to be shellfish, but I’m really here to make questionable aquatic puns, not get into the gloomy details of overfishing and the general collapse of life on Earth. Guardian columnist George Monbiot has written eloquently on this subject, however, and his analysis (from 2019) is that there are almost no fish or shellfish we can safely eat, if we want to save our oceans. “If you really want to make a difference, stop eating fish.”
It may not be by choice, or for environmental reasons, but I reckon the US may start to heed that advice. Disguising fish as meat doesn’t matter if no one can afford to buy it. Food inflation was already bad and now it’s being supercharged by tariffs and the Iran war. If supply chains collapse because of Donald Trump’s war, nobody’s going to be eating Fishy Meat. Instead, the US will be eating crow.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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