Saving Seafood

How To Choose The Safest, Healthiest And Most Sustainable Seafood

May 24, 2017 — Picking out fish should be a simple enough task, right? Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as grabbing a fresh-looking cut or some frozen shrimp and never giving it a second thought. These days we wonder: Does it have mercury? How much? What is its country of origin? Is it being overfished? And a new concern: Am I even getting the right fish?

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Loyola Marymount University recently performed DNA tests on sushi from 26 Los Angeles restaurants and found that 47 percent of it was mislabeled. Yellowfin tuna ended up being bigeye tuna, and red snapper and halibut orders were mislabeled 100 percent of the time, with most halibut turning out to be flounder. A one-year sampling of seafood from grocery stores showed similar rates of mislabeling, which suggests that the fish swap could be occurring earlier in the selling process. This may mean we’re overpaying and getting a less safe catch. Bigeye tuna, for example, is higher in mercury than yellowfin tuna.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post

Something’s fishy in LA’s sushi supply, study says

January 12, 2017 — Almost half of the fish ordered at Los Angeles sushi restaurants and bought at high-end grocery stores is mislabeled, with some of the offerings coming from endangered species, according to a study by researchers at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University.

The study, whose findings were announced Wednesday, checked the DNA of fish ordered at 26 L.A. sushi restaurants from 2012 through 2015 and found that 47 percent of the sushi was mislabeled.

“The good news is that sushi represented as tuna was almost always tuna. Salmon was mislabeled only about 1 in 10 times. 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,” stated a UCLA press release. “A one-year sampling of high-end grocery stores found similar mislabeling rates, suggesting the bait-and-switch may occur earlier in the supply chain than the point of sale to consumers.”

Paul Barber, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of the study that appeared Wednesday in the journal Conservation Biology, said the apparent fraud goes beyond having the wrong fish on your plate; it also undermines environmental regulations limiting overfishing, introduces unexpected health risks and interferes with consumers’ decisions.

“Half of what we’re buying isn’t what we think it is,” Barber said. “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. I suspected we would find some mislabeling, but I didn’t think it would be as high as we found in some species.”

Read the full story at KPCC