Saving Seafood

Would you quit your job for $110,000? This California swordfish catcher said no

October 18, 2021 — As the morning fog peeled off the docks of Santa Barbara Harbor recently, fisherman Gary Burke eyed all that’s left of a fleet that once helped satisfy America’s insatiable appetite for swordfish: four old vessels with splotches of rust showing through peeling paint.

Decades ago, there were more than 100 such ships in Santa Barbara alone, towing mile-long drift gill nets in choppy seas far beyond the breakwater. Today, there are perhaps a dozen in the entire United States, and they will probably soon be removed from service.

Hammered by government regulations, foreign competition, soaring fuel and labor costs, fluctuating market prices, a state buy-back program to take nets out of the water, and conflicts with preservationists over incidental entanglements of whales, porpoises, seals, turtles and birds, Burke’s livelihood has gone the way of Southern California fur trappers and dairy farms.

As if all that weren’t enough, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have issued an advisory warning that swordfish are not safe to eat because they contain high levels of mercury.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

FDA unconcerned about PFAS levels found in processed seafood

August 26, 2021 — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s first survey of per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in processed foods has found levels of the chemicals in certain seafood items. But the agency said it is not concerned about the discovery.

PFAS are found in numerous consumer and industrial products, and are used due to their resistance to grease, oil, water, and heat, the FDA said in a press release. PFAs have been nicknamed “forever chemicals” because they take thousands of years to degrade and because they can accumulate in people’s bodies. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry lists increased cancer risks; disturbances to the immune system; higher rates of thyroid disease and liver problems, interference with a woman’s chance of getting pregnant; and disruptions to the normal growth, learning, and behavior of infants and children as some of the effects of exposure to PFAs.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Study finds “cell-cultured” or “cell-based” best label for lab-grown meat

August 19, 2021 — Researchers at Rutgers University exploring the issue of what lab-grown meat products should be called to differentiate them from their traditional livestock counterparts have landed on the terms “cell-based” or “cell-cultured.”

The labeling issue has more at stake than just being accurate: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture require food products to have a “common or usual name” on their labels so consumers can make informed choices, but the fast-growing industry has yet to settle on a term on its own.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

What to Call Seafood Made from Fish Cells

August 10, 2021 — Food companies, regulators, marketers, journalists and others should use the terms “cell-based” or “cell-cultured” when labeling and talking about seafood products made from the cells of fish or shellfish, according to a new Rutgers study in the Journal of Food Science.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture require food products to have a “common or usual name” on their labels, so consumers can make informed choices.

With more than 70 companies around the world developing cell-cultured protein products and more than $360 million invested in their development in 2020 alone, the adoption of one common name is crucial as products move closer to commercialization.

The study by William Hallman, a professor who chairs the Department of Human Ecology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, confirmed the results from his earlier study comparing seven potential names for these products.

Read the full story at Rutgers Today

US spending bills include millions for seafood-related initiatives

July 30, 2021 — Washington, D.C., U.S.A was a busy place Thursday, 29 July, as lawmakers in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate passed large appropriation bills, both of which included seafood-related line-items and initiatives.

In the House, a package of seven spending bills passed by a 219-208 vote. The appropriations package included funding for such agencies as the Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration and Department of Interior. Among the projects in the bill is a USD 6 million (EUR 5.1 million) initiative secured by Louisiana U.S. Reps. Garret Graves (R), Steve Scalise (R), and Troy Carter (D) that would redirect dredged sediment to coastal restoration projects in the state instead of having it dumped in the Gulf of Mexico.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Harmful algal blooms can be lethal for humans. Scientists wonder if they cause seabird die-offs, too

July 29, 2021 — Paralytic shellfish poisoning, caused by eating seafood contaminated with toxins from harmful algal blooms, can be deadly to humans. Now, using marine samples from Unalaska, scientists are trying to understand if those harmful algal blooms could also be responsible for seabird die-offs.

There’s not much data on how saxitoxin — a harmful compound produced by algal blooms that cause PSP — spreads through the larger food web. But in July, a group of biologists with the United States Geological Survey visited Unalaska to collect samples of plants and animals in hopes of learning more about how saxitoxin levels magnify and diminish as they move through the food chain, from phytoplankton to mussels and up to seabirds.

“We don’t really know how this toxin moves through the food web,” said Sarah Schoen, a USGS wildlife biologist that recently collected marine samples in Unalaska. “There’s still a lot of unknowns, but the more information we can collect about it, the more we’ll understand it.”

Schoen said the project started about five years ago when a major heat wave, known as “the blob,” hit the ocean. Around the same time, there was a die-off of an estimated million common murres — a northern seabird — from Alaska down to California.

Read the full story at KTOO

US FDA: PFAS chemical contaminant levels in fish “not a concern”

July 6, 2021 — The levels of polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in fish do not represent a human health concern, according to a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration report.

PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down naturally, were created as a solution to waterproof and grease-proof surfaces. They are still in use in a number of consumer goods and have been found to be contaminating water supplies across the United States. Medical studies have linked PFAS build-up in humans to cancer, liver and kidney harm, damage to human reproductive and immune systems, and other diseases, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Is Mississippi losing the catfish wars? Flood of fish imports continues despite USDA oversight

June 22, 2021 — Mississippi farmers are losing the catfish wars against their foreign competitors with the very weapon they saw as their salvation.

The domestic catfish industry along with representatives like the late U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi lobbied to move oversight of catfish processing from the Food and Drug Administration to the U.S. Department of Agriculture five years ago with the expectation the USDA’s stricter eye would limit the foreign imports that had decimated domestic production throughout the Mississippi Delta.

Instead, imports of siluriformes– the larger category of catfish and catfish-like fish sometimes referred to by their family name “pangasius”– have only increased since the switch to the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service in 2016. Meanwhile, domestic prices and production, mainly in Mississippi and other Southern states, have continued to decline.

Almost 65,000 additional tons of catfish were imported in 2019 than in 2015 before the FSIS took over according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

The Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce lists recent processing volumes at 5 million pounds per month less than in 2015 during FDA oversight. As domestic prices have declined, the average value of imports has grown with the added USDA label.

Read the full story at Magnolia State Live

Fraudulent Fish Foiled by Cancer-Catching Pen

May 18, 2021 — When chemistry graduate student Abby Gatmaitan first visited the University of Texas at Austin on a recruiting tour, she learned about the MasSpec Pen—a handheld device that scientists there were developing to diagnose tumors on contact. “I knew that was where I wanted to do my research,” she says. Shortly after joining the lab, she realized that if the pen could categorize human tissue, it would probably also work on other animals.

Gatmaitan had a very specific problem in mind, and her hunch paid off. Her research, published this spring in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, showed that touching the tip of the “pen” to a sample of raw meat or fish could correctly identify the species it came from. The device was tested on five samples and took less than 15 seconds for each of them. Roughly the length of a typical ink pen, the tool provided answers about 720 times faster than a leading meat-evaluating technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing—and it was much easier to use. Gatmaitan says it could help scientists tackle a global conservation issue: mislabeled seafood.

Seafood fraud is not just a concern for the restaurant diner who orders expensive, wild-caught red snapper, only to wind up with a plate of mercury-laden tilefish. Such deception also threatens the environment. Mislabeled fishes often come from poorly managed fisheries that can harm local ecosystems. Sometimes a fish is passed off as the wrong species or is falsely claimed to have been caught in a different geographical area in order to evade conservation laws or sell a catch for more money than its market value.

Read the full story at Scientific American