November 11, 2013 — There may be as many opinions about the safety of imported seafood as there are types of imported seafood. The American palate is currently limited to about 10 favored species, yet in other countries, edible kinds of seafood number in the dozens or perhaps hundreds.
Compared with our taste for meat and poultry, American consumers don’t eat that many seafood-based meals. Statistics from 2012 show that we consumed 14.6 pounds of seafood per capita in this country, compared to 80.4 pounds of chicken, 57.5 pounds of beef and 45.5 pounds of pork, and all those numbers have declined in recent years.
When we do eat seafood, occupying our plates most often will be, in order of popularity, shrimp, canned tuna, salmon, tilapia, Alaska pollock, Pangasius (a type of imported catfish), crab, cod, catfish and clams.
According to NOAA Fisheries FishWatch.gov, shrimp is the number-one seafood import to the U.S. market, with most of that product coming from Asia and Ecuador. Our imported salmon mainly comes from Canada, Norway and Chile; imported tilapia (often found in fish tacos) comes from China, Indonesia, Ecuador and Honduras; scallops come from China, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Argentina and Honduras; mussels from Canada, New Zealand and Chile; clams from Asia and Canada, and oysters from China, South Korea and Canada.
The dollar value of approximately 1,500 imported seafood products is more than $10.4 billion and constitutes a “large and growing annual seafood trade deficit,” FishWatch notes.
Perceived risks of imported seafood
Because 80-90 percent of the seafood we consume is imported (with about half of that farm-raised), those who eat it are exposed to whatever level of safety practices exist in the exporting country and onward. A chain of potential risk follows from the catch to the processing facility, to the ships, trains or trucks bringing the seafood here, and to subsequent handling of the product at stores, fish markets, restaurants and in-home kitchens.
Recent recalls of imported seafood and associated foodborne illness outbreaks have combined to raise concerns about how safe it is to consume. There are bacterial hazards such as Vibrio in raw oysters, as well as mercury in fish and adulterants in feed and other contamination tied to industrial pollution.
Recent imported seafood recalls have involved processed products such as smoked salmon, herring and other fish products from Asia and Africa for potential Listeria and Clostridium botulinum contamination and for inadequate processing.
Contaminants are a growing concern. A recent North Carolina study revealed that one-quarter of the seafood imported from Asia and available at retail outlets in that state had detectable levels of formaldehyde.
In China, several antibiotics have been found in farm-raised fish such as tilapia, including leuco-malachite green, which FDA banned for aquaculture use in 1983 because of “serious toxicity.” Three-quarters of the tilapia we eat in this country comes from China.