I'll have the clam strips

[Mike Mercury]

Los Angeles (AFP) - Next time you order halibut, red snapper or yellowfin tuna at a sushi restaurant in the Los Angeles area, you may want to ask for proof of what's on your plate.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/something...035928933.html

According to a four-year study published on Wednesday by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles and Loyola Marymount University, nearly half of the fish served at more than two dozen highly-rated sushi restaurants in the city is mislabeled.

"Half of what we're buying isn't what we think it is," said Paul Barber, a UCLA professor who led the study published in the journal Conservation Biology.

"Fish fraud could be accidental, but I suspect that in some cases the mislabeling is very much intentional, though it's hard to know where in the supply chain it begins."

"We didn't really expect that because Los Angeles is a very foody culture and in general people are very conscious about what they eat," he told AFP.

Willette said the study, conducted between 2012 and 2015, looked at 26 sushi restaurants that were highly rated on the reviewing sites Yelp and Zagat.

Biology students at UCLA were sent out to the restaurants over the four years to collect samples of 10 popular varieties of fish used for sushi. The samples were then tested for DNA.

Willette said of 364 samples tested, 47 percent showed that the sushi was mislabeled.

About the only sure bet was salmon, which was mislabeled only about one in 10 times, and bluefin tuna which was never swapped for a different kind of fish, according to the study.

"But out of 43 orders of halibut and 32 orders of red snapper, DNA tests showed the researchers were always served a different kind of fish," the study says.

Yellowfin tuna was also swapped on seven out of nine orders, usually for bigeye tuna, a vulnerable and overexploited species.

"In some cases, the same restaurant was substituting multiple fish on menus," Willette said. "So say they would propose three types of tuna when they actually served the same type."

He said halibut was often swapped for cheaper species of flounder considered overfished or near threatened while red snapper was substituted for sea bream.

He added that while price was a factor in the apparent fraud that likely involving wholesalers, attempts to skirt fishing policies also played a part.

"Some of it is price, and some of it is regulations," he said.

The study warned that apart from duping consumers, the mislabeling posed a health risk for people with allergies to certain fish and for pregnant women and children who should avoid high-mercury fish.

"A common parasite found in raw olive flounder ... has caused 'rampant' food poisoning in Japan," the study noted.

A spokeswoman at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, which was made aware of the study, said her office had no immediate reaction.

As for Willette, he had one piece of advice.

"I would say if you're going to a sushi restaurant, probably avoid the halibut and red snapper," he said. "Eat salmon because salmon is almost always salmon."

[Kerrmudgeon]

If it smell like fish......EAT IT!

[Mike Mercury]

[99 pewtercoupe]

This problem is not unique to Sushi places.
One In Three Fish Sold At Restaurants And Grocery Stores Is Mislabeled : The Salt : NPR

There are so many fish in the sea. But from a diner's viewpoint, peering down at a sliver of white fish atop a bed of sushi rice, a lot of them look the same.

Now a report from the ocean conservation group Oceana confirms that there's a pretty decent chance that fish on the plate or on ice in the seafood case is not what it's labeled to be. That means that seafood wallet cards designed by conservation groups to help steer consumers towards sustainable choices may not be doing much good.

Between 2010 and 2012, Oceana took 1,215 seafood samples from 674 retail outlets in 21 states. When they tested the DNA, they found that 33 percent were mislabeled. Sushi vendors and grocery stores were the most likely outlets to sell mislabeled food, though Oceana says the fraud can happen before it reaches them.

Earlier investigations by Oceana and the Boston Globe revealed that seafood mislabeling is common in cities like New York and Boston, where people eat a lot of fish. But the report out Thursday shows it's happening across the country, and is as bad or worse in places like Texas and Colorado. Some 49 percent of the retail outlets sampled in Austin and Houston sold mislabeled seafood, while 36 percent in Colorado did so.

So what's the big deal with fish sold under a pseudonym? Well, for one, it's often just a form of swindling – a cheap fish like tilapia sold as red snapper. But Oceana says the practice also can put consumers at health risk when species like king mackerel, which is high in mercury, or escolar, which contains a naturally occurring toxin than can cause gastrointestinal problems, are marketed as grouper and white tuna, respectively.

Oceana's also concerned that substituting cheaper, easier-to-find fish for rarer, more valuable ones gives consumers a distorted sense of the market. Of the fish types most heavily sampled by Oceana, those sold as snapper and tuna had the highest mislabeling rates — 87 and 59 percent. Only seven of the 120 samples of red snapper purchased nationwide were actually red snapper, the report found.
"The majority of fraud is various fish standing in for snapper – it's used as catch-all name for all kinds of white fleshed fish," says Oceana senior scientist Kimberly Warner. "But there are real conservation concerns when you slip in things in place of the real thing. People think snapper must be doing great because it's everywhere, but it's overfished."

Consumers using wallet cards from groups like the Monterey Bay Aquarium and NRDC could end up buying exactly the species they're trying to avoid, Warner says, because mislabeling is so prevalent.

One reason mislabeling has gotten so rampant is that the U.S. now imports 90 percent of its seafood and less than 2 percent is inspected for fraud. That means would-be fraudsters have a lot new options for substitutions.The Food and Drug Administration regularly updates its list of seafood approved for sale – in 2012 alone, 19 new species were added to the list, including cornetfish, sampa and claresse.

So what's the government or a consumer to do about all this? Oceana would like to see an international traceability system where retailers would be required to tell consumers where and when a fish was caught and what gear was used. Requirements like these would help the industry — one of the least transparent in the food system — more accountable.

The National Fisheries Institute argues that the problem is one of enforcement — the FDA needs to do a better job of enforcing laws that are already on the books to discourage fraud. And they encourage consumers to seek out retailers through the Better Seafood Board.

[MidLifeinMI]

Originally Posted by Mike Mercury

"I would say if you're going to a sushi restaurant, probably avoid the halibut and red snapper," he said. "Eat salmon because salmon is almost always salmon."

Or, maybe not.

US salmon may carry Japanese tapeworm, scientists say - CNN.com

[Aerovette]

Not what I envisioned when I read "clam strip".

[OldSarge]

Originally Posted by Mike Mercury

Now that is just funny...........

[Dave]

Stick to non-swimming food and you'll never have a problem.