February 21, 2013 — When you sit down for a meal at your favorite sushi restaurant, the bite at the end of those chopsticks probably isn’t what you think it is. A new report sheds light on this dirty secret of the food industry: Cheap fish is widely passed off as more expensive varieties, at customers’ expense.
One third of the 1,215 samples collected from grocery stores and restaurants by advocacy group Oceana were actually a different kind of fish than what the seller purported. The group found instances of fake fish across the country, and at all kinds of establishments. Nearly half of the 674 retailers Oceana visited sold mislabeled fish.
“Sushi venues had the worst level of mislabeling at 74 percent,” the group said. Excluding sushi restaurants, 38 percent of other restaurants sold mislabeled fish. (Grocery stores, which had the most accurately labeled fish, still had a mislabeling of 18 percent.)
"If you can’t trust your restaurant… it’s kind of off-putting," said Hem Borromeo, an academic adviser at Excelsior College who was not affiliated with the Oceana report. He said a New York Times article last year about fish mislabeling in New York City enlightened him about how pervasive the practice is.
At a sushi eatery he visited earlier this year, Borromeo said he encountered a piece of yellowtail he suspected not have been quite as advertised. “I had… a suspicion,” he said. He ate the mystery fish anyway, but added, “I didn’t go back there again.”
Read the full story at LifeInc