Those plump and tempting scallops behind the fish counter glass might be a lot smaller than they look — a sodium-based compound can bloat scallops well past their actual size. And that pollock fillet isn't such a good deal if the price includes the layers of ice glazed onto it to keep it fresh.
This "overglazing" rips off consumers, as does so-called "soaking" of scallops, which can also alter the taste of the shellfish. At the International Boston Seafood Show this week, a top federal seafood quality officer announced his agency was increasing efforts to stop these and other types of seafood fraud.
The problem with detecting the soaking or overglazing is that both involve legitimate ways to keep seafood fresh, so it's tough to tell when someone is cheating.
The law says a package labeled as 10 pounds of fish must contain 10 pounds of fish, with the ice glaze as extra, uncounted, weight. But the only way to know whether the ice is being counted is with labor-intensive inspections that match the fish weight with the weight advertised on the package.
That happened in 2010, when an investigation by 17 states showed customers were often charged for the ice in seafood packaging, sometimes as much as $23 per pound. In the four-week investigation, 21,000 packages of seafood were removed from shelves.
"This sounds like something that is so simple, and so sort of pedestrian in the world of fraud, you would think … people wouldn't get away with it," said Gavin Gibbons of the National Fisheries Institute, a seafood trade association. "But it is absolutely a challenge."
The soaking of scallops and other seafood, such as shrimp and even whitefish fillets, involves moisture retention agents that keep seafood fresh.
It's tough to define how much is too much for a given species, but their use can be abused. Wilson described a scallop as "a little sponge" that can absorb as much as half its own weight in water. The truth about these bloated scallops becomes clear when they hit the frying pan, shrink and their water burns off.
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