Are you SURE I'm a red snapper?

Like most foodies, I LOVE seafood.  What’s not to love?  But I recently read a great article in Conservation (which is, incidentally, a terrific magazine), entitled “Impostor Fish” that suggests that we should all wonder what we’re really eating when we order a pricey plate of fish. The problem?  Mislabeling of fish.  Fish are mislabeled as they come in the ports, and mislabeled as they’re sold to the consumers, so that while you may be told you’re buying wild salmon, you may really be buying farmed salmon, and if you buy red snapper?  Heaven only knows what you’re getting.

Red snapper is apparently the poster boy for mislabeling; some studies have suggested that as much as 70% to 80% of all red snapper sold in the US is in fact yet other fish, and virtually anything that is red (South African hake, Malabar blood snapper) may be sold as red snapper.  Grouper is also notorious for substitution problems.  Here in New York, a tour of sushi restaurants last summer found that approximately 1/4 of the identifiable species on offer were mislabeled.  Not only are cheaper fish substituted for expensive ones, in some cases endangered or otherwise illegal fish are sold as species that are acceptable in the market.  The problem isn’t just confined to fillets and steaks; American sturgeon roe is sold as Beluga or Osetra caviar, and even putative scallops sometimes turn out to be artistically sculpted fish.

What’s going on here?  Well, that’s a complicated question.  A big part of the answer is that people are eating more seafood now than ever, and thanks to historical poor management, many of the fisheries for our favorite species are in poor condition.  This shouldn’t come as news to anyone interested in conservation issues.  During the last century, the United States has had numerous major fisheries crash as a result of overfishing and poor management, and the results have been really problematic not only for the fish, but for the fishermen, the supporting towns, and all the other sea life who are dependent on those fish as food stock.  People are very fond of certain types of fish, and expect to get them regardless of what time of year it is, where they live, or what kind of demand exists for it.  Unfortunately, less than scrupulous dealers are ready to supply us even with fish that aren’t actually available.

One major method of fisheries regulation in the US is the “derby” fishery, where the fishery closes as soon as a catch quota (specified based on a population analysis of the fish stock) is reached.  In those fisheries, the boats race to catch as much as they can before the season closes, and the seasons can be as little as days or weeks as a result.  This particular form of management, while fine for the fish, means that there can be significant portions of the year in which certain species are simply not available.  Does this keep restaurants from offering those fish on the menu?  Uh, no.  Not always.  I’m by no means an expert, but even I have in the past been into quite reputable seafood restaurants where they were offering fish on the menu whose season I knew for a fact was closed.  Who knows what exactly was being served?

The problem with fish mislabeling goes well beyond the simple issue of the consumers getting their money’s worth.  One of the most major problems is that all this mislabeling results in fisheries management experts, food safety officials, and the other people who are supposed to be keeping an eye on things not having a clear idea of what is happening to which fish stocks. From a population biology standpoint, fisheries regulation is a fairly easy problem.  The population dynamics are comparatively simple and easy to predict if you have enough information and control over the people coming into the system.  It’s the practical aspects that are the problem — the fact that fish go across international borders and so do boats, regardless of whether they’re supposed to.  And if you can’t get good information about how many fish are out there and what people are really catching?  Chaos.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a report on seafood fraud to the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard (of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation).  In the report, the GAO concluded that the three federal agencies having some jurisdiction over the issue of seafood fraud (Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)) are not effectively collaborating with each other and as a result are not sharing information that might be mutually beneficial or identifying areas in which their efforts are overlapping and they could use their resources more effectively. Recommendations to both the FDA and the CBP for administrative actions were made to improve interagency coordination.

That said, though, it’s not clear to me that any of these agencies have the resources or the legislative authority to implement a program comprehensive enough to really fix the problem.  It seems likely that this is going to continue to be a problem until either Congress steps in to create a tracking program, or the consumer agitates about the issue enough to motivate the industry to make that kind of tracking universal.  I certainly don’t have the fix, but as for me, I’ll definitely be paying closer attention to the origins of my seafood from now on.

Tags: conservation, fish, seafood mislabeling

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 7:03 am and is filed under Et alia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.