Author: Chris D’Angelo / Source: WIRED
This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
If you eat seafood, even occasionally, there’s a good chance you’ve been served a fish species you didn’t order.
A new months-long investigation by ocean advocacy group Oceana finds widespread and persistent fraud in the US seafood industry. The organization tested 449 fish from more than 250 restaurants, seafood markets, and grocery stores across the country and found that 21 percent of samples were mislabeled.
In two restaurants in Florida, cheap imported Asian catfish and spinycheek grouper, a species found only in the Indian Ocean, were sold as hogfish. In Washington, DC, sea bass on a restaurant menu turned out to be farmed tilapia. And at a grocery store in Springfield, Virginia, Greenland turbot was labeled Alaskan halibut.
Mislabeled seafood is a rampant problem around the globe―one that Oceana has been looking at for nearly a decade. In a 2013 analysis, the group found that as much as one-third of fish sold in the US was mislabeled.
The new study did not include the 13 types of imported seafood covered by the federal Seafood Import Monitoring Program. Established in 2018, the program aims to combat illegal fishing and mislabeling by requiring imported tuna, king crab, shrimp, and other…
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