October 28, 2015 — That wild Alaskan salmon you ordered the last time you ate out might not be wild — or even from Alaska.
That’s the finding of a study by the conservation group Oceana, which says nearly half of the country’s favorite fish may be mislabeled and priced too high in restaurants and stores when it’s out of season.
Researchers performed DNA testing on 82 salmon samples collected in Virginia, Washington, Chicago and New York in the winter of 2013-2014.
They found 43 percent of the samples were mislabeled. The most common switch — accounting for two-thirds of the cases — was selling farmed Atlantic salmon as the more expensive wild-caught product.
A similar study by Oceana during the summertime commercial fishing season, when wild salmon is plentiful, found only 7 percent was mislabeled, suggesting supply-and-demand fuels the phenomenon.
Most of the mislabeled fish was found in restaurants, not stores — probably because large supermarkets are required to provide more robust information about the fish they are selling, the group said.