Fishy Fraud

[Fu Lai]

Knowing how much of a seafood lover my girl and generally Chinese are this report came out Thursday of widespread fish mislabeling. The USA imports 90% of its seafood and only 2% in checked so they figure this is a way to label a cheap fish as a more expensive one to make money, fraud. But there are other problems with it.

 

Earlier investigations by Oceana and the Boston Globe revealed that seafood mislabeling is common in cities like New York and Boston, where people eat a lot of fish. But the report out Thursday shows it's happening across the country, and is as bad or worse in places like Texas and Colorado. Some 49 percent of the retail outlets sampled in Austin and Houston sold mislabeled seafood, while 36 percent in Colorado did so.

So what's the big deal with fish sold under a pseudonym? Well, for one, it's often just a form of swindling – a cheap fish like tilapia sold as red snapper. But Oceana says the practice also can put consumers at health risk when species like king mackerel, which is high in mercury, or escolar, which contains a naturally occurring toxin than can cause gastrointestinal problems, are marketed as grouper and white tuna, respectively.

Oceana's also concerned that substituting cheaper, easier-to-find fish for rarer, more valuable ones gives consumers a distorted sense of the market. Of the fish types most heavily sampled by Oceana, those sold as snapper and tuna had the highest mislabeling rates — 87 and 59 percent. Only seven of the 120 samples of red snapper purchased nationwide were actually red snapper, the report found.

More here.

 

also...

Even though fish mislabeling has been documented before, these two recent reports — one by the Boston Globe and the other by Consumer Reports — underscore how rampant the practice is. The Boston Globe tested the DNA of 183 orders of fish at various outlets in the Boston area and found that a higher percentage were mislabeled (48%) than were correct (46%), with a small fraction having inconclusive results. Some of the substitutions were particularly egregious: “All 23 white tuna samples tested as some other type of fish, usually escolar, which is nicknamed the ex-lax fish by some in the industry because of the digestion problems it can cause.” That’s pretty gross.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/fish-mislabeling-rampant-in-stores-and-restaurants.html#ixzz2LgTsL7UN