February 22, 2013 UPDATE: Oceana has published a report about national seafood fraud. Two years of DNA testing found that a full third of seafood was mislabeled; snapper and tuna had the highest rates of fraud. Oceana has even created a handy map for a depressing look at your odds of purchasing mislabeled fish. You heard it here in 2011, and now we can confirm that it’s even worse than we’d thought.
…
As a kosher-keeping, organic-preferring, gluten-avoiding person, I’m quite used to thinking about what’s in my food on the most minute levels. High-end consumers now get a chance to ensure that the seafood they buy is really the item they’re willing to pay for through the use of DNA barcoding. The USDA has approved use of this system for restaurants and stores, which can identify 167,000 of the 1.8 million known species.
Mislabeling, whether accidental or intentional, is rampant. It’s also an easy way to make a profit – most people can’t differentiate between whole fish, forget once they’re filleted or sliced for sushi. According to a study undertaken by high school students, endangered fish were being relabeled as top choices on the sustainable fish list. More than half of the places they took samples from had mislabeled their fish. In some cases, it was outright fraud, such as using Mozambique tilapia as a stand-in for white tuna (don’t miss Ripert’s somewhat snobbish comment in which he puts the blame on consumers for not being able to taste the difference).
There are health risks to relabeling food items, even when they’re whole foods. In 2007, monkfish imported from China turned out to be pufferfish, which is potentially fatal if not correctly prepared.
The barcode check would occur at point of sale, although it’s not far off to imagine that one day customers may carry their own to test big-ticket items before purchasing – steak, furs, and leather handbags would be casually verified. The DNA barcode technology has a lot of awesome potential applications. I’d like to see it used to ensure that organic foods are free of genetically modified organisms. It also has the potential to simplify the job of regulating agencies who could quickly check the provenance of a something as small as an oat.
Comments are closed.