December 11, 2012 — If you buy fish in New York City, particularly from a small market or restaurant, there's a pretty good chance it won't be the fish it claims to be.
An ocean conservation group announced today that three in five retail outlets it visited, including 100 percent of sushi restaurants, were selling mislabeled fish. The report is just the latest in a string of investigations revealing that seafood mislabeling is commonplace.
The researchers, from the group Oceana, collected 142 fish samples earlier this year from 81 retail outlets, including large grocery stores, corner bodegas, high-end restaurants, and sushi bars. They analyzed the samples using DNA barcoding, and found that 39 percent of the fish were labeled as other species.
Farm-raised Atlantic salmon had been substituted for wild-caught salmon, they found. Ocean perch, tilapia, and goldbanded jobfish were sold as red snapper. Fish labeled "white tuna" was escolar, which can cause acute gastrointestinal problems. And one serving of halibut was really tilefish, a species with so much mercury that the Food and Drug Administration has placed it on the do-not-eat list for pregnant women and young children.
The study didn't address who exactly is responsible for the mislabeling — whether at the supplier or the retail level. "That's for the enforcers," notes Kimberly Warner, a senior scientist at Oceana.
Last year the Boston Globe reported that 48 percent of fish in Massachusetts were mislabeled, similar to findings in Los Angeles (55 percent) and Miami (31 percent). A follow-up from the Globe published earlier this month found that 76 percent of fish in a new survey were mislabeled.
And in 2008, two New York City high school students conducted their own DNA study of four restaurants and 10 grocery stores in Manhattan and found that a quarter of the fish they sampled were mislabeled.
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