March 17, 2021 — The first notable thing about the wild salmon fillet Dane Chauvel shows me is its colour – a rich red that, even over FaceTime, makes my mouth water. The second notable thing is that it’s definitely salmon.
This might not seem like a debatable fact. Chauvel is co-founder of Organic Ocean Seafood in Vancouver, Canada, housed in a historic building at the mouth of the 854-mile (1,375km) Fraser River, one of Canada’s main salmon courses. The company supplies many high-end restaurants, and wild-caught salmon makes up a large proportion of its sales.
But as the exclusive Guardian Seascape report indicating the extent of global seafood fraud has shown, it’s not always so easy to tell what your fish actually is. In the analysis of 44 studies worldwide, more than one in three seafood samples of 9,000 analysed were mislabelled.
Chauvel is not surprised by the revelations. “The fishing industry is a mess,” he says. “It’s dysfunctional.”
He can prove, however, that the salmon in his hands is a salmon, because the fish has been included in a random DNA testing programme – the world’s first.