Featured Image Credit: YouTube/Food Kingdom
Topics: Weird, Food and Drink
Tom Wood
People who eat crabsticks are swearing off them for good after discovering how they are made, and maybe you might as well if you knew the actual truth.
There’s a famous saying – everyone wants to eat sausages, but nobody wants to know how they get made.
That’s because the process is not exactly the most appetising thing in the world, it involves a fair bit of grinding, no small amount of blood and gore, and even some offal for good measure.
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Still, that doesn’t stop loads of people tucking into sausages every single weekend – or every single day in some parts of the world.
Crabsticks are another beloved snack food, but also another that you might want to skip the lesson on how it gets from the sea to your plate.
On YouTube, there’s a video that has recently gone viral that opens the door on how crabsticks are created, and once you’ve seen what is behind that particular door, you can’t forget about it.
Once you get this grey frothing matter into your grey matter, you won’t be able to get it out of there.
So, without further ado, how about we actually learn how this s*** goes down?
It starts out with some meat.
It’s just frozen fish meat, but it’s not – as you might have been led to believe – crab meat.
Broadly speaking, the grey meat is comprised of a species called Alaskan pollock.
That meat is then fed into a mixer, where it is mashed up, then churned up with other ingredients such as egg whites and wheat, which is then – you’ve guessed it – mixed up once again.
That creates a paste-like substance that is vaguely reminiscent of building putty or clay.
Lost your appetite yet?
Well, the next step is to get that goo and feed it into a machine that creates just one long strip of meaty material, which is then spun together – woven like rope – to create the texture of crab or lobster meat.
Some of that stuff is then sold off as surimi or substitute crab meat, before other bits of it are coated in the orange coloured casing that you might associate with crab or lobster, then sold as crabsticks.
Obviously, loads of people aren’t happy with their new knowledge.
One person commented: "I will never purchase this ever again! Thank you for opening my eyes!"
Another said: "I always thought this stuff was disgusting, now I KNOW it is."
Not everyone was so discouraged, though.
Someone else said: "I love adding lots of mock crabmeat to my delicious pasta salad recipe. See, now y'all went and made me hungry!!!"
"To be perfectly honest, I like the product. It's very affordable and makes a very good cold crab salad,” said another.
OK, so maybe some people do actually want to see how the sausage gets made.