Something Fishy About Fish Dishes

Written by Jack Dini on July 13, 2021. Posted in Current News

Seafood is an important source of protein worldwide. However, it is susceptible to a variety of fraudulent practices, including species substitution, illegal transshipment, and short-weighing.  (1)

Today, more than 90 percent of the seafood consumed in the US is imported, and less than 1 percent is inspected by the government specifically for fraud. DNA testing found that one-third, or 33 percent, of the 1,215 seafood samples were mislabeled, according to US Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

Why is seafood fraud bad? Seafood fraud creates a market for illegal fishing by making it easy to launder illegally caught seafood products. The US may also be an easy target for dumping illegal poor quality or unpopular seafood because import controls are few and far between.

Lets look at some results from the past to present:

In 2012 high school students Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss posed as diners at more than a dozen high-end sushi restaurants and fish stores. Unbeknownst to the proprietors, Stoeckle and Strauss took small samples of raw fish back to a lab for DNA fingerprinting. The result were devastating: one in four fish was mislabeled, always as a more expensive delicacy: everyday cod was marketed as red snapper; roe from common smelt sold as roe from flying fish; cheap tilapia lovingly presented as pricey ‘white tuna.’

When New York’s top news media picked up the story, a furor ensued. Bubbled ‘sushigate,’ the findings embarrassed prestigious Japanese restaurants and led the Food and Drug Administration to improve new regulations for testing and labeling fish. (2)

Oceana made headlines in 2016 by publishing a report finding massive seafood fraud on a global scale. Since then the NOAA Fisheries created the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP), to track 13 species deemed at high risk of being fraudulently sold or sourced illegally. None of the 13 SIMP monitored species were sampled. “We wanted to highlight that there are other species other than the high risk species,” says Kimberly Warner, a senior scientist at Oceana.  In a 2019 test of fish bought in 24 states and the District of Columbia, Oceana found consumers weren’t getting what they paid for.

Oceana found that 20 percent of the 449 fish they tested were incorrectly labeled. Orders of sea bass were often replaced by giant perch, Alaskan halibut by Greenland turbot, and Florida snapper by lavender jobfish, to name a few.  (3)

In August 2019 Phillip R. Carawan, former owner, president and CEO of the North Carolina based supplier Capt. Neill’s Seafood, plead guilty to having his company falsely label over 179,000 pounds of foreign crabmeat worth more than $4 million as ‘Product of USA’ blue crab from at least 2012 to 2015. Most of this meat was then sold at wholesale clubs. (4)

In March 2021, The Guardian released the results of it own meta-analysis reviewing 44 studies that looked at restaurants, markets and fishmongers in over 30 countries. The newspaper found that 36 percent of over 9,000 products were mislabeled. Of the countries included, the United States was the third worst, with 38 percent of seafood mislabeled, behind only the United Kingdom and Canada both of which had an appalling 55 percent mislabeling rate. (5)

Mike Pomranz adds, “No matter how often research shows that the seafood industry is overrun with fraud, we can’t seem to get the issue under control. A 2017 study found half of Los Angeles sushi wasn’t what it was supposed to be (6) and a 2018 study revealed over a quarter of New York supermarket fish was mislabeled or global (7), and reports from Oceana found a fifth of all seafood globally and in the United States, respectively, were mislabeled. And yet, despite government action and the promise of technical solutions like detectors and databases, it’s not getting better.

The big takeaway says Pomranz is something anyone who has been following this issue probably already guessed: seafood fraud is a problem nearly as vast as the ocean, and proving especially difficult to navigate. (5)

References

1. Anthony J. Silva et al, “Seafood fraud,” Food Fraud, 2021, Pages 109- 137
2. Robert M. Hazen, Symphony in C, (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019)
3. Sarah Gibbens, “What is seafood fraud? Dangerous—and running rampant, report finds,” nationalgeographic.com, March 7, 2019
4. Mike Pomrantz, “US seafood supplier admits to mislabeling over $4 million worth of crab,” foodandwine.com, August 15, 2019
5. Mike Pomranz, “Seafood fraud is wildly rampant, says new report,” foodand wine.com, March 15, 2021
6. Noah Kaufman, “Hey Los Angeles, half your sushi isn’t what you think is it,” foodand wine.com, January 12, 2017
7. Mike Pomranz,” Over 25 percent of seafood at New York supermarkets is mislabeled, says attorney general report,” foodandwine.com, December 18, 2018

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