Shrimp replacement theory

On a plate in front of me are three shrimp: One is wild, one is farmed, and the last one isn’t a shrimp at all. 

It’s a vegan “shrimp,” one of several brands that have come to market in the last decade. It looks like a shrimp. When I pick it up and flex its tail backward, it snaps back into the signature “C” shape real shrimp take on to swim backward through the water column. When I squeeze it between my fingers, it gives just enough. If I had a blindfold on, I’m not sure my fingers could feel the difference.

Shrimp is the most consumed seafood in this country, with the average American scarfing down around four pounds of it every year — roughly equivalent to the second (salmon) and third choices (tuna) combined. This is a problem. In their wild form, shrimp are a disaster. The fine-meshed trawls used to catch them cause the ensnarement of multiple pounds of other marine life for every pound of shrimp on the plate. Shrimp farming, meanwhile, has wiped out millions of acres of carbon-sequestering mangrove forests and been host to some of the worst kinds of labor abuses. 

The fake meat community is very much aware of all this. As Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods were ramping up the production that would eventually lead to massive investments and stock market gains, a few companies were working on the underwater bogeyman that is shrimp. 

One of the first modern-day successes came in 2013, when Eugene Wang launched a line of fake shrimp, under the now-defunct brand Sophie’s Kitchen, using an ingredient from Chinese culinary tradition called konjac. I say the first “modern-day” fake shrimp because in Asian traditions ersatz land and sea proteins have been around for quite some time. “Chinese vegetarians, particularly Buddhists, have been eating fake meats and seafood for centuries,” Andrew Coe, the author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, wrote to me recently in an email. “The main, meat-like ingredient in their dishes is usually some kind of processed soy (pressed tofu, etc.) or wheat gluten, i.e. seitan.” 

Konjac, when it was brought into the Buddhist kitchen in the sixth century, allowed early meat-replacers to take their art to a new level. Known by various aliases (elephant yam, devil’s tongue, voodoo lily), it features a starchy underground “corn” that is high in a fiber called glucomannan. The Japanese were particularly good at working with it, developing a jelly-like substance they named konnyaku that can be poured into a mold and congealed. 

Konjac works as a shrimp replacer because, according to a 2022 study in the journal Foods, it has “viscoelastic” and “rheological” properties — viscoelastic meaning that to some extent it behaves both like a liquid and a solid, and rheological in that it is a “soft solid,” so in response to applied force it tends toward a plastic flow rather than deformation.

In more plainspoken terms, it gives just enough when you bite it. 

The konjac key turned out to unlock a lot of boxes for a lot of entrepreneurs, and by the early 2020s, you could find a range of products in the more politically correct supermarkets. Shock’N Shrimp, from Good2Go Veggie, gave you a deep-fried, ocean-less experience. The Mind Blown line, from the Plant Based Seafood Co., provided your simulacrum battered with coconut. And Shrimpish®, from a company called ISH, filled your plate with a naked product that, at least from a distance, looked very much like shrimp. I could list a couple dozen more products that were on the market by the 2020s, but I suspect the reader is already worn out by vegan lingo and plant puns. Beleaf me, I get it. 

Many of these brands use konjac, though in the evolutionary race toward the perfect bounce, there was some modern-day, industrial tweaking. “There are other gums and thickeners and gels that create that muscle with a spring and a bounce,” Shelly Van Cleve, the co-founder and product developer of the Plant Based Seafood Co. told me. Van Cleve’s vegan scallop starts from the same set of konjac and other ingredients as her vegan shrimp. Handled and cooked differently, they become different animals, so to speak. It just depends how viscoelastic you want it to be.

If konjac and the other gums and gels are the common structural jumping off point from which most fake shrimp leave port, it’s in the flavoring where they may sail in different directions. Many manufacturers seek to permeate their products with an oceany essence derived from various marine additives. In a way, this simulates how flavorings get passed up the food chain in nature. In wild ecosystems, microalgae, aka phytoplankton, are typically consumed by zooplankton, which in turn pass their nutrients, tastes, and pigments further up the food chain to crustaceans and fish. Salmon and shrimp have pinkish colors in their flesh because of the reddish phytoplankton at the base of their particular food chains. 

Fake shrimpers, like another recently defunct imitation seafood company, New Wave Foods, brought ingredients like algae and seaweed into their plant-based “flesh” for structure as well as for flavor and omega-3 content. A scroll through flavorings in other shrimp-ish things brings you the usual vegan suspects, such as paprika, sea salt, and brown sugar, as well as all the umami pretensions and promises you can find on any vegan label.

But how does it feel in the mouth? I wonder with trepidation as I bring my teeth down into the fake shrimp’s “flesh.”

In my two decades covering the seafood industry, I have eaten shrimp shoreside next to the farms of Cà Mau, Vietnam and bolted down raw wild shrimp straight off the deck of a Louisiana trawler in the sticky heat of a Gulf of Mexico night. Like Bubba in Forrest Gump, I’ve had “pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried, there’s pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich.” With all that in my memory as I begin to chew, what I’m eating feels in my mouth more like an analogy to shrimp than shrimp itself. Almost as if AI spun it out based on a prompt the same way ChatGPT might write a poem about your lover if you told it she had brown eyes and a limpid smile. 

Yes, konjac and the other viscoelastic gums in the ultraprocessed arsenal have properties that convey an impression of the body qualities a creature must have to retain neutral buoyancy. But life is not made by pouring stuff into a mold. Just like the rings in a tree, shrimp tissue grows in fits and starts, pocked here and there with collagen that give the living animal functional structure. All of that imparts a feeling of not-quite-predictable resistance as you bite through it. Even though entrepreneurs try to introduce a feeling of natural randomness by varying the size and shape of the individual fake shrimp, the plant-flesh itself is uniform throughout. In the wrong context, you could mistake it for bologna. 

I don’t want to give up on the idea of a shrimp replacement. Food scientists are on to something, and perhaps with a little more R&D they might get there. But the level of investment in alt meats in the past is no guarantee for future success. After the Beyond and Impossible brands soared in the late 2010s, fake land meat plateaued in the 2020s while fake seafood saw only modest growth. And whereas before, developers felt somewhat free to experiment with konjac and its kin, the “ultraprocessed” label threat has left them scratching their heads. “I go for exact replication before I look at the guardrails and labels,” Van Cleve told me. “To replicate an entire animal, that’s a hard thing to accomplish. So if you’re doing that, you have to sometimes put blinders on. Otherwise you’d have nothing in your toolbox.”

I will wait to see what emerges from the toolbox next. But if I had to choose between wild shrimp, farmed shrimp, and fake shrimp, I might, for the moment, just choose no shrimp at all.