June 25, 2013 — In the world of seafood, looks can be very deceiving. And unfortunately for anyone who buys fish, it's easy for people above you in the supply chain to sell you something other than what you want.
Oceana, a conservation group, has been beating the drum about seafood mislabeling for a while. Back in February, the organization released a study that found that 33 percent of the seafood it sampled at retail outlets in 21 states was mislabeled. (Note: The sampling was not randomized, so the findings should be taken with a grain of salt.)
This month, Oceana hosted a dinner with the National Aquarium in Washington, D.C., to prove once again how easy it is to become a victim of seafood fraud.
"It's nearly impossible for anyone – even experts — to tell the difference between many species of fish," Beth Lowell, Oceana's campaign director, tells The Salt.
The event began with a raw fish guessing game. Kimberly Warner, Oceana's senior scientist, stood with a clipboard and pen by a large silver bowl filled with ice and six glistening fillets of fish. The objective? To correctly identify wild salmon, red snapper and halibut paired with almost doppelgangers beside them.
The undecided included chef Xavier Deshayes of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, who had prepared the meal we would soon eat. At first, Deschayes told me that he doesn't fall victim to mislabeling because he uses only purveyors that he trusts.
But as soon as he saw the two coral-colored fillets of salmon on the ice, he admitted that he didn't know which one was wild. "It's a lot easier to tell when you're looking at a whole fish instead of a fillet," he said.
Listen to the audio and read the full story at NPR