Healthy living & lifestyle
Something’s fishy
The fish-free diet has been on an exponential rise, with animal welfare, environmental impact and health concerns driving its popularity. As food science innovation continues apace, there have never been so many fish
alternatives readily available at your local supermarket. Abi Millar speaks to the experts to find out how suppliers are providing novel plant-based fish.
now, the market really started to explode in the 2010s, following the introduction of sophisticated new food processing technologies. Unlike vegetarian staples such as tofu and seitan – although delicious, they’re very clearly not meat – today’s faux meats are engineered to be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. Bite into a Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods burger, and you may feel that you’ve entered uncanny valley. The new iteration of fake meats look, taste, smell, feel and in some cases even ‘bleed’ like the animal products they’re replacing. That means whether you’re looking for plant-based sausages, burgers, mince or chicken nuggets, you can easily find products that would hold their own in a blind taste test. What’s more, they come without the ethical and environmental question marks. Until recently, though, there has been one conspicuous omission to the list, and that’s been
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he plant-based meat market is going from strength to strength. While brands like Quorn and Tofurkey have been available for decades
plant-based fish. It is not that plant-based seafood hasn’t existed; it’s just that you might not have been able to find it easily, and many of the products that were available left something to be desired. In 2021, the plant-based seafood industry generated just $42.1m, according to a report by Allied Market Research (AMR). That’s a drop in the ocean compared to plant-based meat, which AMR has valued at $5.3bn. As the report stated, ‘high prices of plant-based seafood and inability of plant-based seafood to mimic original seafood taste restrict the market growth’.
A sea change in the market All this said, we could be on the cusp of change. That same report from AMR added that ‘technological advancements and new product launches present new opportunities in the coming years’. It also noted the many reasons people were turning away from real seafood: ‘the depletion of natural ocean resources, rise in global population, increase in pressure on the global
Ingredients Insight /
www.ingredients-insight.com
Ma Di/
Shutterstock.com
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