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As the last major food that is primarily wild-caught, fish offers unique perspectives on relationships among nature, quality, and agro-food production. Developing a case study of changing constructions of quality in the global surimi seafood industry, this paper explores how ideas about quality are not simply social constructions that have material effects, but are complex interactions between natural inputs and their environments, production techniques and technologies, and foods and their uses. Surimi is a fish paste made from a variety of fish species, including Alaska pollock, the largest fishery in the world, and is used to make a variety of seafood products, including both traditional Japanese fish cakes and imitation seafood products (e.g. ‘krab’), which is the most common form in the US and Europe. Drawing on recent approaches to relationality, the analysis treats product quality neither as a purely objective …