Watching the sausage being made is a sure way to put you off of it...

[jducoeur]

... or watching the imitation crabmeat, in this case. The current episode of Unwrapped, on Food TV, is showing how they make the stuff, and it's enough to confirm my utter lack of desire to ever consume it. They show everything from the large frozen bricks of chopped fish it is made from (which look like nothing so much as uniform white plastic building blocks), the adding of artificial flavor ("the fish in its raw form has almost no flavor!"), the blending, the extruding (yes, it is actually pureed and extruded), and the painting with a nice red stripe down the side.

Okay, it's a process that I casually accept when the subject is candy. But somehow, when applied to fish, it's oddly horrifying...

Comments

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Interesting. So, if I understand you, we're horrified precisely by different extremes of the spectrum: you by extreme artificiality, and me by extreme naturalness. As I said, I see surimi as the moral equivalent of tuna salad, or perhaps a more apt description would be mer-Spam %^). It's processed, but basically it's something I'm quite comfortable eating: it's the flesh of fish. On the other hand, I can't get around the fact that whole lobster involves eviscerating a huge arthropod. And -- an order of magnitude more disgusting than that -- eating a soft-shell crab involves not eviscerating a huge bug, just chomping it down whole, guts and all. Spee-EEEW! (As the old joke goes: "What's worse than finding a worm in your apple? Finding half a worm in your apple.")

[jducoeur]

Yep, that seems to be the difference. I largely came to terms with my own carnivorous nature years ago, and while there are still things that cross the line for me, shellfish generally doesn't do it. So long as it doesn't have eyes, I'm usually not too perturbed by it. But I find processed meat a bit -- I don't know, unfortunate -- even in cases I do eat (hot dogs, hamburgers, canned tuna), and there are points at which it just gets a little too weird for me. I think my reaction to Spam is not too unlike yours to soft shell crab: I find the idea a little nasty...