August 18, 2016 — “Most people don’t think data management is sexy,” says Jared Auerbach, owner of Red’s Best, a seafood distributor in Boston. Most don’t associate it with fishing, either. But Mr. Auerbach and a few other seafood entrepreneurs are using technology to lift the curtain on the murky details surrounding where and how fish are caught in American waters.

Beyond Maine lobster, Maryland crabs and Gulf shrimp, fish has been largely ignored by foodies obsessing over the provenance of their meals, even though seafood travels a complex path. Until recently, diners weren’t asking many questions about where it came from, which meant restaurants and retailers didn’t feel a need to provide the information.

Much of what’s sold has been seen as “just a packaged, nondescript fish fillet with no skin,” says Beth Lowell, who works in the seafood-fraud prevention department at Oceana, an international ocean conservation advocacy group. “Seafood has been behind the curve on both traceability and transparency.”

What’s worse is that many people have no idea what they’re eating even when they think they do. In a recent Oceana investigation of seafood fraud, the organization bought fish sold at restaurants, seafood markets, sushi places and grocery stores, and ran DNA tests. It discovered that 33 percent of the fish was mislabeled per federal guidelines. Fish labeled snapper and tuna were the least likely to be what their purveyors claimed they were.

Several years ago, Red’s Best developed software to track the fish it procures from small local fishermen along the shores of New England. Sea to Table, a family business founded in the mid-1990s with headquarters in Brooklyn that supplies chefs and universities, has also developed its own seafood-tracking software to let customers follow the path of their purchases. Wood’s Fisheries, in Port St. Joe, Fla., specializes in sustainably harvested shrimp and uses software called Trace Register.

And starting this fall, the public will be able to glimpse the international fishing industry’s practices through a partnership of Oceana, Google and SkyTruth, a nonprofit group that uses aerial and satellite images to study changes in the landscape. The initiative, called Global Fishing Watch, uses satellite data to analyze fishing boat practices — including larger trends and information on individual vessels.

Sea to Table hopes to sell fish directly to home chefs starting this year, too.

But local seafood can cost more than many Americans are accustomed to paying, which partly accounts for the rampant seafood fraud in this country.

“U.S. fisheries are very well managed and are actually growing nicely,” said Michael Dimin, the founder of Sea to Table. “But the U.S. consumer’s been trained to buy cheap food, and imported seafood is really cheap because of I.U.U. fishing.” I.U.U. stands for illegal, unreported and unregulated. The result is unsustainably fished, cheap seafood flooding American fish markets and grocery chains.

“To us, the secret is traceability,” Mr. Dimin said. “If you can shine a light on where it came from, you can make informed decisions.”

Read the full story at the New York Times