As sustainability and long term management show results, it is no longer effective to scare people. The Oceana was not a scientific sample at all. Oceana was sampling with bias to make a point.
SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton (News Analysis) Feb 21, 2013 – Oceana released a well documented report today on DNA testing of seafood. It is definitely worth reading – not because of its conclusions – but because Oceana did spend a fair amount of money documenting seafood sales in different parts of the country.
The conclusion – being trumpeted in most media outlets today – is that seafood fraud is widespread, and that consumers should not trust their fish.
Why is Oceana doing this? Our view is that as sustainability and long term management of fish stocks shows results, it is no longer effective to scare people and sow doubt about seafood by claiming that the oceans are being overfished and we soon will be a nation of jellyfish eaters. Facts got in the way, and this scare tactic is no longer working. So one alternative is to say that seafood cannot be trusted because the sellers won't tell you what species you are eating. It is another effort to undermine consumer confidence in seafood.
But the study was not a scientific sample at all. Out of 1215 total samples, 15.3% were snapper; 9.4% were frozen tuna, 9.5% cod, and 31.6% salmon.
None of this sampling reflects actual US seafood consumption. For example, salmon is 14% of US seafood consumption; cod is 4%, and frozen tuna and snapper are less than 1% combined. Yet together these species represented about 65% of all Ocean's samples.
Obviously, Oceana was sampling with bias to make a point.
With hundreds of commercial fish species, plus hundreds of local names and variations, proper naming of seafood to FDA requirements has been a long standing issue in the industry.
There is no real standard. The FDA relies on common market practice, except where it decides not to.
So species that fall into grey areas are easy prey for mislabeling.
Snapper is the poster child for this. There are hundreds of snapper species in the world, and in a long tradition, rockfish caught on the West Coast has been sold as pacific snapper as well. Nevertheless, there is an understanding that red snapper refers to a particular species from the Gulf of Mexico, Lutjanus campechanus. The FDA says that anything labeled red snapper that is not this species is mislabeled.
But there are hundreds of other snappers – and there is rockfish. West Coast states have traditionally sold some types of rockfish as snapper; and the FDA has allowed this so long at the fish was caught in the state in which it was marketed.
So the upshot is that there is an immense gray area which allows those who write menus to use snapper. And as Lisa Weddig said in a quote in the Wall St. Journal, If the invoice came in as snapper and it says red snapper on the menu, then you know where the problem is.
Oceana's sampling of snapper shows that 93% of the samples they flagged as mislabeled were either another species of snapper, including Lutjanus species, or were pacific rockfish. In fact in their report, Oceana admitted that on the West Coast, some of the sellers they flagged were following their state laws, but Oceana does not like those laws.
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