July 22, 2012 — A new study shows some seafood purchased in restaurants and markets isn’t what it is advertised to be — but South Florida is more vigilant about seafood labeling than some other places.
When you order fish at your favorite South Florida restaurant or buy fillets from the supermarket, there’s a chance you are not eating what you thought you bought. The marine conservation group Oceana recently tested 96 fish samples purchased from 60 outlets from West Palm Beach to Key Largo and found that nearly one-third of the seafood was mislabeled.
According to Oceana’s report released Monday, the species most often misrepresented was red snapper, which usually turned out to be a less-expensive snapper species such as dog snapper or lane snapper, and even sea bream from the Pacific — not a snapper at all — in 86 percent of samples. Grouper, mislabeled 16 percent of the time, was substituted with king mackerel or Asian catfish in several samples.
The report says sushi sellers were the worst offenders, with 58 percent of samples mislabeled. Fish advertised as “white tuna” turned out to be escolar — a snake mackerel containing a toxin that causes digestive distress — in all the samples collected from 15 sushi venues in South Florida, Oceana said.
Grocery stores had the lowest numbers of wrongly labeled fish — about 8 percent of samples collected. Restaurants were in the middle at 36 percent.
Oceana senior scientist Kimberly Warner, one of the report’s co-authors, says seafood fraud has a negative impact on consumers’ wallets, health and the health of the world’s oceans.
“Depressing, very troubling,” Warner said last week in a telephone interview. “This is not a local problem. We see it every place we look.”
The good news for South Florida: seafood fraud is less rampant here than in Southern California where Oceana found more than half the fish samples it tested from grocery stores and restaurants were something other than what was advertised, and in the Boston area where up to 48 percent of seafood was mislabeled.
Warner said eating the wrong fish can cause health problems for consumers who are allergic. There’s also the potential for ciguatera — a neurotoxin found in some large reef fish that can lead to chronic, long-lasting symptoms. In the case of king mackerel being substituted for grouper, there’s the issue of mercury: the Food and Drug Administration says women of child-bearing age and children should not eat kingfish due to high levels of the heavy metal. Escolar, falsely called ‘white tuna’ by some sellers, is the subject of FDA health warnings for its gastric effects.
Read the full story in the Miami Herald
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