In the 1960s a Japanese chemist discovered that surimi could be stabilized and frozen with the addition of sugar, the man at the podium explains. And that discovery launched the surimi industry in a fleet of Japanese factory ships. They joined ships from the Soviet Union and Poland, plying the north Pacific rim from Alaska to Oregon, trawling for fish that most salmon-fishing Americans would throw back as trash, fish with little value beyond fertilizer. He shows us pictures of factory ships in the Aleutian Islands, where smaller fishing boats deliver a nonstop supply of pollock to be minced, salted, and pressed into blocks of frozen gel. Blocks are shipped to processing factories in Japan or Europe where the gel is mixed with starch, color and flavor extracts, molded into shapes and shipped to markets around the world.

My mind wanders to the slit in the curtain, where I glimpse the Columbia River Bridge, arching like a rainbow out the window. I watch an enormous cargo ship head under the bridge and out to sea. It seems to me like a lot of time, trouble, and expensive diesel fuel to make imitation seafood out of real seafood. The lights come back on and we break for lunch.

“I think it’s real salmon,” laughs the man seated to my left at lunch, as he pokes his entrée with a fork. With remarkably little attention paid to the decidedly real seafood presented appealingly on their plates, my lunch companions discuss the problem of what to call the stuff made from surimi once it lands on grocer’s shelves. When surimi foods began to appear in American markets, the state of Maine passed a law requiring any product made of surimi and masquerading as say, Maine lobster, must be clearly labeled as “imitation.” Federal laws soon followed. Krab with a “k” became a kind of kompromise.

“So, now in the United States you have food labeled imitation surimi!” said a seafood marketer from Bangkok, sitting across from me. “It is real surimi! In Thailand, surimi food products not just feed man’s appetite for taste, but feed the imaginative mind of man. It is art as well as science.”

I took the last bite of my real salmon.

The afternoon session found me in the hotel’s sunlit lobby with a handful of conference refugees escaping PowerPoint, including Michael Morrissey, a food scientist from Oregon State University who recalled the Astoria waterfront as Cannery Row.

Sitting in a comfortable chair overlooking the Columbia, he tells me that in the 1970s, when the foreign factory ships came looking for hake off the Oregon coast, the open seas were pretty much wide open for fishing beyond the three miles offshore. But when the lucrative Pacific salmon industry went belly-up in the late 70s, West Coast fishermen were quick to blame the foreign fleets with their fish-gulping nets so close to shore. The U.S. Senate responded by claiming sovereign territory to 200 miles offshore, banishing the foreign fleets and giving local fishermen exclusive domain out to the continental shelf. But by then, fish were scarce, fuel was expensive, and the big canneries—Bumblebee and Starkist—were moving away, taking jobs and markets with them.

“Fishermen are resourceful,” Morrissey says. They saw an opportunity to put their boats back to work by filling the empty holds of foreign factory ships that had been forced 200 miles offshore. “And they’re politically very astute,” he adds.  Oregon fishermen were negotiating a joint economic venture with the Soviets at the same time the US government was boycotting the Moscow Olympics.

The fishermen’s joint venture lasted until the 1990s, when shore-based fish-processing plants replaced the foreign factory ships in Newport and Astoria. Some fish plants that had been boarded up for a decade reopened as manufacturers of surimi. And hake, the boney whitefish reviled by salmon fishermen, got a marketing make-over and changed its name to Pacific whiting. America was in the surimi business.

“But we still don’t eat much of the stuff,” I remarked.

“No,” Morrrissey agreed. “Most of what we make we send overseas. The French love it. You’ll see tomorrow.”