Surimi is not mostly fish, it is mostly soy, wheat, various starches. Fish (blended Alaskan pollock usually) is a minority of material in most packagings.
This came as a shock to me. The macronutrients don't lie, though. Fish is protein and a little fat, carb content is fractions of a gram, and these labels are telling me that there's more carbohydrate than protein.
The ingredient labels that the FDA allows, do find a way to lie. If you read a ten-ingredient label that says "Ingredients: Beef, wheat flour, corn flour, oats, textured vegetable protein, canola oil, vegetable oil, xanthan gum, carageenan, salt", and tell people that this is the highest-percentage ingredient to the lowest-percentage ingredient ordering, most people will assume it's >75% beef, but all the label is saying numerically is that it's >10% beef; If every other ingredient was in the 9.0 to 9.9% range then the beef input would be around 1/6th of the material. Add more ingredients and this can be manipulated even more.
I also don't think this is comparable. Blended Alaskan pollock had an immune system before it hit the cold chain.
I had foolishly given them the benefit of the doubt and after poking around their entire damn website site and I now hate them. I couldn't find a nutrition label but buried in text was information I need.
"4-5 grams of protein per 100 gram serving" "fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae"
Real Coho Salmon is about 20% protein and 7% fat so we're looking at less than 20% of the important parts being salmon. I retract my previous comment. It's not Salmon.
I believe the FDA defines a minimum of 40% of a meat product to be made of that meat to be labeled as that meat (eg. beef hotdogs needs to be made of 40% beef) and I'm not sure if this qualifies as that.
As a benchmark, the tuna used in a Subway tuna sandwich is 100% tuna, the beef in Taco Bell beef tacos is 88% beef, and the chicken in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets is 100% chicken but make up 45% of the nugget.
Thank you for the point about “ingredient stuffing”. I had never considered this method of deceiving consumers and will be on the lookout for it.
Why doesn’t the FDA require explicit percentages be listed..?
In other countries, they do.
In the US, the invisible hand of the market will surely push a food producer to regulate itself effectively.