SAN FRANCISCO — August 30, 2012 — The braised chunk of fish labeled “Local Halibut Filet” at a posh San Francisco restaurant where a group of food sleuths were eating looked appetizing, but the first two bites were forked into a little plastic container filled with a preservative salt concoction.
Later that day, Geoff Shester, California program director for the nonprofit group Oceana, would send the preserved morsels, along with more than 30 other samples taken from a variety of San Francisco restaurants, to a laboratory for DNA testing.
The idea, he said, is to find out whether the halibut was what the menu said.
They would also find out if, as advertised, the seafood was really wild and local or if it was shipped from a fish farm.
It is now possible to determine what species is being served at the local fish shack, thanks to recent advances in genetic sequencing. Oceana, a ocean preservation group, is testing fish nationwide to find out whether seafood fraud is as widespread as some people think it is.
“There is a huge demand now for sustainable seafood, so we need mechanisms to reward and create market incentives for sustainable fishing that take into consideration the health of the ocean,” Shester said.
The problem is the consumer doesn’t know whether the fish is what the restaurant, fish market or grocery store claims it is.
Shester said that could change as testing becomes more widespread. New technology has made it easier to detect fraudulent fish. The genetic tests his group conducts cost $20 to $200 apiece, depending on a sample’s purity – lemon sauces are particularly problematic.
Misbranding food for financial gain is illegal under state and federal law. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration publishes a guide of acceptable market names for certain fish species, but the laws can be complicated. The agency lists 14 species that can be labeled “tuna.”
Oceana has found seafood mislabeling everywhere it has tested, including Boston, Los Angeles and Miami. The group hopes to test fish platters in at least six coastal cities around the country.
The DNA-testing campaign, in which dozens of volunteers are provided testing kits with instructions and monitoring sheets, created an uproar when the early results came out. In South Florida, Shester said, results showed that 31 percent of the fish tested at restaurants and markets was mislabeled.
In Los Angeles, 55 percent, and in Boston, 48 percent of the fish sold was not what it was touted to be, he said.
A closer look at the results in Los Angeles showed that eight out of nine sushi samples labeled as “white tuna,” or shiro maguro, were actually escolar, which Shester calls the “ex-lax fish” for its purgative effect on the digestive system. Escolar is not among the 14 species that can legally be labeled as tuna.
Oceana found that 87 percent of the sushi venues tested misrepresented the fish being served, the worst record of any type of restaurant. Thirty-one percent of grocery stores misidentified fish, Shester said.
Read the full story on Newsobserver.com