At the mouth of the Columbia, where the West’s largest river meets the world’s largest ocean, 70 people have come from around the world to learn how to make fake seafood.

We’re crowded into a conference room in the Hilton Hotel in Astoria, Oregon. The hotel is new, built as part of the economic revitalization of Astoria to replace the abandoned canneries that lined the edge of the town’s derelict waterfront. Although the curtains are drawn so participants can focus on facts in PowerPoint, some of us on the far side of the conference room can glimpse between the curtains toward long vertical scenes of sunshine glinting off the blue Columbia River and the distant green shores of Washington State.

 “Welcome to Surimi School,” says the man at the podium with arms outstretched like a preacher. He is Jae Park, our host for the three-day workshop, a food scientist, and the man who wrote the book on surimi. A native of South Korea, Park helped pioneer ways to process trash fish into a product that can imitate expensive seafood delicacies from around the world. Park started Surimi School in 1992 as an annual event in Astoria. Since then, his school has grown to include annual sessions in Paris, Bangkok, and Santiago, Chile, as the idea of making artificial seafood expanded to all hemispheres and became an industry worth nearly a billion dollars worldwide.

Surimi is sort of like Jell-o made from fish. The Japanese invented it, the French love it, and it’s saved the jobs of a fleet of fishermen in the north Pacific. There are people here from all over the globe—fishermen from Alaska, seafood processors from Mexico and India, sugar suppliers from the American Midwest, marketers from France and Russia, food scientists from Asia—a United Nations of seafood that for the next three days will explore the science and future of surimi.

Park welcomes the first speaker to the podium, a food chemist from Carolina with a soft southern drawl. Soo-ree-mee, he explains, is like cookie dough. It can be flavored, colored, and shaped to resemble crab meat, shrimp, scallops, even ham. In the United States, it’s the stuff inside a California sushi roll, and it’s the basic ingredient in krab salad, always spelled with a “k” so there is no mistaking it for the real McCoy. But in Asia, surimi is marketed in its own right, not imitating anything. Since at least the 16th century, surimi has been a delicacy made only in Japanese kitchens by cooks who created the shimmering white gel from left-over fish filets ground up with a dash of salt, as a way to preserve the extra catch.

 “There are 500 ways to serve surimi in Japan,” a marketer from Japan explains to me during a break between sessions. “But the one we love always the best is komobuko.”

He explains that komobuko, a molded fish gel, is served on a simple wooden board. “During holidays, it comes in all colors and is given as gifts,” he explains. “You will taste some tomorrow.”

Oh, I’ve already tasted komobuko, or something like it, I assure him, recalling my first exposure to krab kuisine in the salad bar section of the university cafeteria. The pure white chunks were splashed with lipstick red coloring and bathed in mayonnaise. How, I wondered at the time, could anyone mistake this soft, sugary piece of latex for crab?

 “That is not komobuko. You will taste some tomorrow,” he repeats with emphasis, dismissing himself with an imperceptible bow.

As a silhouetted speaker intones to the darkened room, I learn that there’s more to surimi than just trash fish and lipstick. It’s actually carefully filleted trash fish, mostly boney, soft-bodied pollock and hake from the cold water of the north Pacific. Slides flash on the screen showing assembly lines of moon-suited workers as they take off the heads and slice the white muscle meat from the fish. Then they mash up the fillets in a rotating drum and wash the minced fish repeatedly in huge metal tubs to remove soluble fats, residual salts, and any lingering taste or aroma of fish.

 “In southeast Asia, they’re using little tropical fish now to make surimi,” the man sitting next to me whispers in the dark. “Tiny little fish. The women fillet them with tiny little scalpels.”