Surimi, or Imitation Crab / Fish

Surimi is imitation crab or fish made from flakes of white fish or haddock, egg whites, starch, and crab flavorings. Without the added flavoring, surimi has not much taste.

Usually, surimi has red stripes on one side, which is dyed to make it more visually appetizing. And, as you can see above, surimi can be decorated with not just red stripes but also Hello Kitty faces! Very cute! But do you really want to eat toys' faces?

So surimi is a fish product that has little natural taste and is naturally visually unappealing. Hungry yet?

If you are still hungry, follow the last link here to watch a Food Network video Eat Me Daily posted to show the 4-hour surimi processing procedure.

Photo from Oishii Yo!

Processed Soy = Evil

I always knew to think of processed soy products as evil, and here is one specific reason why: whole soybeans are bathed in the chemical solvent hexane to concentrate high-protein isolate. Usually, you can find soy-protein isolate in a lot of fake meats. But hexane is neurotoxic and, thus, "poses serious occupational hazards to workers, is an environmental air pollutant, and can contaminate food". Yes, it can be found on your soy food products if you don't buy organic. Luckily, in the US hexane is prohibited in organic products.

But the whole point of the article I read is that many of our 'organic' soybeans come from China, where organic oversight is so slack...

Process your own soy with mold, my friends. Let our microfloral allies do the work for us. Because mold ferments soybeans to make tempeh, it is actually more digestible than tofu.

Photo by Clearly Ambiguous