"On the menu, but not on your plate" by Jenn Abelson and Beth Daley Globe Staff / October 23, 2011
A five-month Globe investigation into the mislabeling of fish showed that Massachusetts consumers routinely and unwittingly overpay for less desirable, sometimes undesirable, species - or buy seafood that is simply not what it is advertised to be.
Americans are so numb to that they can't even smell the stink anymore.
In many cases, the fish was caught thousands of miles away and frozen, not hauled in by local fishermen, as the menu claimed. It may be perfectly palatable - just not what the customer ordered. But sometimes mislabeled seafood can cause allergic reactions, violate dietary restrictions, or contain chemicals banned in the United States.
The Globe collected fish from 134 restaurants, grocery stores, and seafood markets from Leominster to Provincetown, and hired a laboratory in Canada to conduct DNA testing on the samples....
The results underscore the dramatic lack of oversight in the seafood business compared with other food industries such as meat and poultry. Nationally, mislabeled fish is estimated to cost diners and the industry up to hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to the National Fisheries Institute, a trade group.
Just like any other AmeriKan industry.
It happens for a range of reasons, from outright fraud to a chef’s ignorance to the sometimes real difficulty of discerning one fillet from another. But industry specialists say money is commonly the motivator: It’s a way to increase profits - a cheaper fish sold as something more pricey - on the assumption that customers will not detect the difference....
Just like any other AmeriKan industry.
Imported fish - most of it frozen - makes up 86 percent of the seafood Americans eat, compared with less than 50 percent in 1980. Last year, the United States imported about 5.5 billion pounds of fish worth almost $15 billion, much of it from China.
As consumption of foreign seafood has increased, so has mislabeling, according to industry specialists. Because the sea-to-plate process has become so long and complicated, there are more opportunities for fraud and mistakes to take place. And the absence of regular testing by federal and state agencies has allowed fish substitution to thrive....
I'm glad I rarely ever eat fish.
--more--"
The Globe makes you about as sick, too.
