December 17, 2012 — When non-profit ocean conservation group Oceana released a report last week detailing the fraudulent sale of mislabeled fish in New York City as a widespread practice, it got lots of press and shocked consumers. But no one should have been surprised.
This kind of fraudulent food labeling is shockingly pervasive in this country, and this particular topic of bait and switch fish sales in New York stores and restaurants, confirmed by genetic testing, was demonstrated by an acquaintance of mine back in 2008.
Oceana’s findings are not exactly subtle, since their report is titled “Widespread Seafood Fraud Found in New York City,” and is available as a pdf download. As many outlets, including the New York Times, recently reported, Oceana used genetic testing to prove that among other dubious swaps, tilapia and tilefish are often passed off as the more expensive red snapper. Other cited examples were tilapia posing as catfish, escolar sold as white tuna, while an Asian fish called pangasius (or ponga) is routinely passed off as everything from catfish to sole to flounder to grouper. FDA rules even allow fast food chains (and others) to sell langostino as lobster, despite the simple and rather obvious fact that it is not (it’s actually a member of the crab family), and that real lobster is both expensive and highly coveted. The Oceana study purchased 13 varieties of seafood, of which only four did not turn out to be fakes some of the time. It noted that every single one of the 16 sushi restaurants tested – 100% – failed in accuracy, and overall so did 39% – well more than third – of restaurants and retail fish sellers. That is widespread.
Despite the ominous title and results of the study, New Yorkers actually fared relatively well. Oceana cited much higher fake fish stats for Boston (48%) and sushi-mad LA, where over half the samples (a whopping 55%) were not what they purported to be. Miami did the “best” of the cities cited with “only” 31% of its fish fraudulent. I’m sure Southern Floridians will sleep well knowing that 69% of the time they eat out, a grade we call a D in school, they can expect to get what they ordered paid for. The Times article also noted similar results in investigations in Florida by the St. Petersburg Times and Massachusetts by the Boston Globe, which Times food reporter Kim Severson summed up by saying that “Massachusetts consumers routinely paid for more expensive fish and got cheaper substitutes.”