March 19, 2015 — Consumers are overpaying and the government is losing out on tariffs—now federal agencies are cracking down.
On a typical mission, Kimberly Warner would go to a restaurant. After browsing the menu, she always picked a seafood dish. She made casual conversation with her dinner companions and took mental notes of her meal. When the waiter wasn’t looking, she would snatch a marble-sized, sauce-soaked sample and slip it into her purse. Mission accomplished.
As far as covert operations go, seafood sleuthing isn’t the most glamorous work—but that doesn’t bother her. “I feel like a real detective,” says Warner, the lead scientist in a 2012 study on mislabeled fish by Oceana, an ocean conservation group. The fruits of Warner’s stealth proved disheartening: Oceana reported that 33 percent of fish it tested in American restaurants and markets were impostors, products of seafood fraud.* At these volumes, such fraud, committed knowingly or not, is swindling Americans out of up to $25 billion annually.
Who stands to gain from passing off low-grade seafood as upscale entrees? To avoid an anti-dumping tariff of about 65 percent instated for low-priced imports, foreign seafood businesses use fraudulent species to throw off inspectors; one case of Asian catfish posing as grouper saved the perpetrator more than $60 million in tariffs. And once these shipments make it past customs, they can go on to fetch large amounts of money. Catfish can be sold as grouper, for example, for as much as four times its typical price.
While this puts restaurants at risk—unwittingly selling a fraudulent product is never good publicity—the harms of seafood fraud fall disproportionately on consumers. Besides spending more for a lower-value product, they may be paying for the health risks that come with unchecked fish. Federal officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have discovered FDA-banned antimicrobial agents and high levels of mercury in imported grouper. The Oceana report also found that 84 percent of white tuna samples were actually escolar—a fish that causes digestive problems—in disguise.
In his 18 years as a forensic scientist, Trey Knotts has seen more than 2,000 catfish filets in disguise.
Short of building a home laboratory, there’s not much consumers can do to make sure that they’re buying the fish they’re paying for. They can try to stay sensitive to prices that are too good to be true, or they can buy seafood from a member of the Better Seafood Bureau, a trade organization that documents and reports fraud along the seafood supply chain.
They might also seek out the 10 percent of fish that isn’t imported—as it turns out, our domestic fisheries tend to follow the rules for seafood labeling. “We have some of the better managed fish and show evidence that some species are being rebuilt after getting overfished,” says Warner.
Read the full story from The Atlantic