The main ingredient is usually surimi, a paste that is made of fish and essentially formed through the processing of other fish into a paste and other ingredients are starch, egg whites, sugar, water, vegetable oil, salt and additives.
Surimi is often made with pollock, which is used to make fish sticks and breaded fish products.
Have you ever seen some stuff that is mixed with gobs of mayo and it is usually used to make crab salad or red and white meat stuffed in a sushi roll or even crab sticks in frozen cases at grocery stores?
Yeah, that’s imitation crab.
Before answering your question, I have to give you whole lotta information about what plant-based means and explaining the differences of 3 different plant-based diets.
As you can see in the name of it “plant-based” as a word is an adjective that is referred to foods or diets that are truly based on plants which basically means that the majority or even the whole of it comes from plants.
The only unexplained part of plant-based diet is that there is no clear answer for the question “does plant-based mean that it has no meat or a little bit of meat?”
Most websites and vegan magazines claim that plant-based means every food in the diet is without meat and there is no way of having even a little bit of it.
In contrast, it is really obvious that they really stand up for that fact.
But as of 2021, a contributor of Harvard Health Publishing which is the medical school of Harvard University wrote a blog and stated that plant-based or plant-forward eating patterns focus on foods primarily from plants and it doesn’t certainly mean that you can’t be a vegetarian or you must be vegan and you can never eat dairy or meat.
So, in conclusion, we are going to say that because of mixed opinions there isn’t a one-way theme for plant-based diets.
Previously, I said that there were 3 main plant-based diets and they vary from one to another.
And that leads us to more explanation about plant-based diets and different variations of it.
People who follow vegetarianism are called vegetarians.
A vegetarian is someone who follows a plant-based diet that is mainly based on plants which means, most of their foods come from plants.
Now we get to meat eating allowance, vegetarians don’t eat any meat which supports the fact that they don’t want to consume any kind of animal meat because that leads to animal killing.
In simple words, they don’t want to kill animals in order to meet their food needs.
But that doesn’t mean that they don’t eat animal products.
I don’t want to make this article, a personal article but I have to say that I’m a vegetarian myself and speaking from a vegetarian standpoint I can firmly say that the vegetarian community doesn’t have any problem with eating animal products such as milk, cheese, butter, yogurt, cream, ice cream.
The items above were all dairy products that can be eaten directly or you can use them to make some sorts of foods and snacks.
Also, you should know that all of them products are made from milk and there are loads of different types of them.
Like for cheese, we have blue cheese, cheddar, mozzarella, feta, parmesan, cottage cheese, cream cheese, etc.
Even there are different types of cream.
Such as, sour cream, light sour cream, heavy whipping cream.
And these products mentioned are only dairy products.
There are other animal products like eggs and honey.
To sum it up, you should know that vegetarians eat animal products because they claim that eating animal products won’t lead to animal killing.
Do vegans eat Imitation Crab?
Now, I’m going to talk about veganism.
A vegan is a person who follows a vegan diet which is also another plant-based diet.
Vegans don’t eat any kind of animal meat, neither do they consume any animal product.
Vegans believe that you should never consume any form of animal products because of particular ethical reason.
The ethical reason that vegans don’t even eat animal products is animals’ suffering.
For instance, they say that cows suffer from being milked constantly.
Or another example could be the cruelty of chicken farms.
Because, every year, around 7 billion male chicks are killed by egg producers.
So, the main difference between vegetarianism and veganism is eating or not eating animal products.
I’m a vegetarian myself. so, it wouldn’t be fair for me to say which is better or which one is worse.
Next up, we are going to talk about another so-called “plant-based” diet that might be weird for many people and speaking personally, it doesn’t make any sense to me too.
Do Pescatarians eat Imitation Crab?
A pescatarian is someone who chooses to eat a vegetarian diet which means plants and dairy but also eats fish and different types of seafood.
Healthline website explains their diet as a largely plant-based diet of whole grains, legumes, nuts, healthy fats with seafood playing a key role as a main protein source.
Also, most of them also eat dairy and eggs.
Although I believe that their diet is nonsense, but pescatarians claim that their diet is eco-friendly because it reduces climate impact since the carbon footprint of it is much less than the carbon footprint of raising land animals.
Carbon footprint is an indicator that showcases the total amount of greenhouse gasses emitted from an activity, product or company.
As a vegetarian, I am completely against the ideology of counting pescatarians as people whose diets are plant-based.
To me, it is utterly foolish since they say it is cruel to kill land animals but it is acceptable for them to kill animals which live in water.
We have to bring imitation crab back to the conversation.
Despite people who eat meat, pescatarians eat crab meat too.
But the invention of imitation crab has a long story.
But before we get to that part, I have to ensure you that although this article is all about imitation crab, we don’t suggest it to anybody. Because not only you are still killing animals, but you are also damaging nature by fishing.
It is estimated that between 0.97 to 2.7 trillion fish are caught each year.
Overfishing is a real crisis.