Foodtech start-up Plantish is giving consumers a first look at its flagship product, a 100% plant-based whole-cut salmon fillet, which the company says mimics cooked salmon in texture, taste, appearance, and structure.

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Co-founder and CEO Ofek Ron says that the Plantish team keeps its mission close to its heart – "to save the oceans and eliminate the need to consume marine animals by providing more sustainable, more nutritious, and more delicious fish options."

According to market research firm IMARC Group, the seafood market today is worth $586 billion, and salmon accounts for $50 billion of that. Approximately 80% of fish is consumed whole or in fillet form. But the alternative seafood sector offers mainly minced fish options because of the complexities of producing whole "cuts."

The technical difficulties come not only in creating a facsimile of the taste, texture, and mouthfeel of fish from the ocean, but also its structure and scalability. Producers need to find the right plant proteins to achieve fibrous stands that will stand in for fish flesh.

The first product Plantish is launching is Plantish Salmon, which the company describes as a fully structured, boneless plant-based salmon fillet. The startup says Plantish Salmon has the same nutritional value as conventional salmon, and is high in protein, Omega-3s, Omega-6s, and B vitamins. And as an added bonus, unlike fish from the ocean or aquaculture, their product is reportedly free of mercury, antibiotics, hormones, microplastics, and toxins.

"Our vision is to be the world's leading seafood brand," says Ron, "all without hurting a single fish."

Plantish's current prototype can be cooked in all the ways that conventional salmon is prepared. The company plans to introduce its salmon fillets at select pop-up locations by the end of 2022, and officially roll it out in 2024.

Plantish joined the burgeoning alternative protein start-up scene in early 2021 and shortly thereafter after raised a pre-seed round of $2 million from TechAviv Founder Partners, and angel investors that include Michelin-starred chef José Andrés and Nuseir Yassin of the Nas Daily vlog.

The founders of Plantish are a mix of serial entrepreneurs, bioengineering and chemistry PhDs, and foodtech executives.

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Do they fishtail when they hit black ice? Do they carp about traffic? The jokes almost make themselves, but it's true – in new research from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, a goldfish has successfully "driven" a robotic car.

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Hoping to discover whether animals' innate navigational abilities are universal or restricted to their home environments, BGU researchers designed a set of wheels placed under a goldfish tank. The wheels were tricked out with a camera to record and translate the fish's movements into wheel movements.

To test whether the fish was really navigating, researchers placed a clearly visible target on the wall opposite the tank. After a few days of training, the fish navigated to the target. Moreover, they were able to do so even if they hit a wall "en route." They also avoided being fooled by false targets researchers placed in their paths, making them more savvy than some Waze users.

Video: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

The team discovered that a goldfish's navigational ability supersedes its watery environs.

"The study hints that navigational ability is universal rather than specific to the environment. Second, it shows that goldfish have the cognitive ability to learn a complex task in an environment completely unlike the one they evolved in. As anyone who has tried to learn how to ride a bike or to drive a car knows, it's challenging at first," says Shachar Givon, a Ph.D. student in the Life Sciences Department in the Faculty of Natural Sciences.

Givon conducted the study with Matan Samina, an MSc student in the Biomedical Engineering Department in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences, Professor Ohad Ben Shahar of the Computer Sciences Department and head of the School of Brain Sciences and Cognition, and Professor Ronen Segev ​of the Life Sciences & Biomedical Engineering Departments.

Their findings were published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Behavioural Brain Research.

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Back to school shopping? Inspectors from the Agriculture Ministry caught on Sunday a predatory fish that had been found swimming in a decorative fish pond at a shopping center in central Israel.

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The inspectors visited the shopping center following an incident a few days earlier in which a woman who stuck her hand into the pond was bitten, prompting an alarmed call to the ministry's hotline.

The inspectors who arrived on site were surprised by both the fish's species (alligator gar) and its size – one meter (3.3 feet) long.

Given that it was unsafe to leave the gar in the pond, the inspectors decided to remove it using special equipment.

The Agriculture Ministry has launched an investigation into how the alligator gar, a predatory species of fish, found its way into the pond in the first place. Israeli fishing regulations ban this species from being raised.

Mainly, the alligator gar feed of other fish and water fowl, and can grow to a length of two meters (6.6 feet).

Hagai Neuberger, who oversees inspection and enforcement in the fishing sector at the Agriculture Ministry, said, "It's important to note that according to fishing regulations, keeping banned fish is a crime. Keeping banned fish poses a threat to biodiversity in Israel and to people, and in this case was a clear and present danger to the public."

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Jews who lived during the First Temple period used to eat non-kosher food, a study published Monday by Tel Aviv University revealed.

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The study was co-authored by two researchers. Dr. Yonatan Adler is affiliated with Ariel University. His colleague Professor Omri Lernau, is from the University of Haifa in Israel. The journal, Tel Aviv, is a publication of Tel Aviv University.

The findings shed light on the origins of the laws of kashrut in the Torah. According to these laws, fish that lacks fins and scales, is prohibited.

As part of their research, archeologists analyzed remains from 30 sites throughout the southern Levant that date back more than 2,000 years.

"The prohibition of fish with no fins and scales deviated from traditional Jewish dietary habits," co-author of the study, Adler, said.

Types of fish such as "catfish and sharks appear to have been banned despite the fact that these species are often found in Jewish menus. There is no reason to assume that the basis of the prohibition in the Torah lies in some ancient taboo," he said.

The prohibition of eating certain types of fish appears in the Torah twice, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. In both cases, the ban to eat non-kosher fish is preceded by the prohibition of eating pork.

Having presented their preliminary conclusions, the archeologists plan to research when Judeans began to avoid eating finless and scaleless fish and what the level of adherence to this prohibition is in modern times.

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