February 27, 2013 — It does the domestic fishing industry little good to have customers avoiding fish because they don't trust the sellers.
I confess that I had never heard of escolar until last week when the environmental group Oceana found it being fraudulently sold as white tuna 84 percent of the time across the United States.
Escolar is remarkable for possibly having more side effects than everything but fugu, or pufferfish, which can kill you.
It really says something when the Japanese allow preparation of fugu by licensed chefs but consider escolar so toxic that it's been banned.
The problem is that escolar, which is quite waxy, oily and delicious (I am told), can cause a couple days of very colorful, explosive digestive problems because of all that wax.
I guess the Japanese must consider that a fate worse than death.
Escolar is but the most vivid example of a problem stemming from the false labeling of fish in markets and restaurants.
Like the horsemeat that's showing up in hamburger across Europe, most of the mislabeled fish in this country isn't really going to hurt you. Mostly it's a matter of sellers taking advantage of people's ignorance or the sameness of many species of fish to extract more profit from the exchange.
So good for Oceana, along with the Boston Globe last year, for spending the time and money to do hundreds of DNA tests to determine what exactly is being sold to us.
Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard Times