Seafood Fraud

Recent studies by Oceana and others have alerted many consumers that they cannot be completely sure where the seafood on their plate came from or even what kind of fish is on their plate.  Earlier in the year, Oceana published the results of extensive testing and revealed that one-third of the seafood samples tested across the country were mislabeled.  Generally, consumers imagine restaurants and markets passing off mackerel as grouper or farmed salmon as wild salmon so they can charge the highest possible price.  Seafood fraud, however, includes a variety of other activities, such as over-breading prepared seafood products or packaging fish with too much ice to artificially increase the weight of seafood products to drive up the price.  Seafood fraud isn’t always employed merely as a means of simply passing costs along to the consumers.

For example, foreign seafood producers […]