Posted on 05/01/2017 11:30:50 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Order red snapper at a restaurant and more often than not you will fall victim to fish fraud — a bait-and-switch tactic that occurs with alarming regularity. And that sashimi at your favorite sushi joint? Unless you’re dining at Masa in New York ($595 tasting menu), that white tuna you love is probably escolar — commonly called “the Ex-Lax fish” for the intestinal distress it causes. (Japan has banned escolar for decades, so serving it as sushi is disingenuous at best).
These are just two examples of sinister seafood scams that come with huge hidden costs. A few years ago the ocean conservation group Oceana tested more than 25,000 seafood samples across the country and found that 1 in 5 were mislabeled. And while such fraud can occur along any part of the supply chain, more and more it’s the restaurants providing the kick to your gut, your wallet and to the oceans.
Late last year the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office fined high-end Morgan Hill restaurant Odeum $120,000 for surreptitiously serving customers tilapia disguised as higher-priced petrale sole.
Misbranding or falsely advertising food violates California health and safety codes — yet it happens quite frequently — right under our noses.
In his book “Real Food Fake Food,” author Larry Olmsted (www.realfoodfakefood.com) outlines a scenario that’s difficult to digest: Food fraud is a $50-billion-a-year industry, and the breadth of the counterfeiting — from olive oil to Kobe beef — would surprise you.
“All of the food fraud I cover in my book is what the FDA terms an ‘economic cheat,’ meaning consumers are ripped off anytime they overpay for something less than they think they are buying or ordering,” Olmsted said. “So pocketbooks are broadly victimized.”
(Excerpt) Read more at montereyherald.com ...
Even worse is the rampant use of CMC to enhance the appearance of imported shrimp.
http://www.naturalnews.com/055820_shrimp_imports_chemical_injections_food_fraud.html
Have you experienced indigestion after eating shrimp from what used to be your favorite seafood place? (I have - and after talking to the owner found he was indeed using VietNamese and Thai shrimp.)
American shrimp ONLY!
OK, I know about Grouper and a few things about catfish.
We had one sitting in the Oval Office, a while back.
That's where the real money is. A $15 bottle of wine sells for $40+ in a restaurant. Or $5 - $15 per glass. It's obscene.
I used to eat Mullet in Biloxi Mississippi too. Delicious sweet.
I was in the biz for a couple of years.
In addition to fraud, there has been some creative marketing of trash fish as delicacies. For example, Ecuadorian shrimp are mostly unremarkable because they are pink. But they are the best-tasting. Tiger shrimp are vividly striped. But they are low quality. Still, tiger shrimp get all the attention in menus and recipes.
Orange roughy comes from the area around New Zealand (at least the commercially fished-turned-foodservice roughy does). That’s a long trip, which means it’s impossible to keep roughy fresh all the way through to the dinner plate. In other words, it’s all frozen but that doesn’t stop restaurants from claiming to serve ‘fresh’ orange roughy.
‘Crabmeat’ salad really often isn’t. It’s usually Alaskan pollock which has a similar taste due to the cold water environment it also inhabits.
Ah well...there’s always something to learn if one is willing to learn it. I know the restaurants that, regardless of their upscale or downscale appearance, serve the good stuff or the trash.
That is OK, I have eaten your share of shellfish several times over.
When I was a kid around 1960 the local supermarkets in DeFuniak Springs nearly always had mullet for 9 cents a pound.
I can remember Mother showing me how to tell if they were fresh. If I remember right, if there was any red in their eyes it was not fresh.
It had to be fresh to be good.
I was going to post one of him unless someone beat me to it. You chose a good pic!
First thing I thought of.
Not nearly the definition of BnS.
Don’t forget to offer a Geiger counter add-on.
Fukishima is still pouring radioactivity into the Pacific Ocean (while the so called “environmentalist movement” sucks its collective thumbs).
Always buy your fish whole and filet it yourself.
In the case of salmon, your can spot farmed vs wild and can watch the butcher cut your slabs. That way you are not forced to buy a $200 fish.
Buy ONLY, ONLY US Gulf shrimp and prawns, wild caught and only US wild caught shellfish of any kind. Shellfish from anywhere in Asia gets most of it’s nutrition from human sewage.
> When will the consumer catch on? <
Well, if consumers do catch on, I hope they don’t let the offending restaurants off the hook.
(sorry)
“(sorry)”
Put a cork in it.
Quit trolling ...
Fortunately we live near lots of water and have a boat (although in this area you can do just fine surf or pier fishing.) We won’t eat fish he, or one of his fishing buddies, hasn’t shot or caught.
I’ve heard horror stories about fish swaps at restaurants, and then you have the risk of ciguatera if you don’t know where the fish is caught. Add to that the imported fish/shellfish they sell at the grocery, and it’s all pretty grim.
Occasionally a news channel will do an expose on how many grouper sandwiches at different restaurants are actually grouper. I’ve read one of these surveys ever year or two, and nothing changes. The restaurants cheat.
Bait and Switch as a ‘cute’ pun for a headline.
I don’t order fish when eating at a restaurant. I buy my own fresh fish and cook it the way my wife likes it. It’s 1/3 price of buying in a restaurant and it is better than what you get in a restaurant.
In our area, you are only allowed to catch mullet with a cast net. But they don’t catch them to sell locally. They harvest the roe and sell that, it’s where the money is. We still have smoked mullet sometimes. But IMO, there’s not much better fish fried. Fried Mullet, cheese grits and hushpuppies.
I heard a story on a documentary from an old guy who grew up in the Ten Thousand Islands area of Florida. When he was growing up, they wanted fried mullet, forget the grouper, mullet was what they preferred.
We still have a couple local fish marketers who sell mullet to the public. $10 for 10 lbs., gutted, but not cleaned. But if you’re going to smoke it, that’s the way
you want it anyway.
We always were told to look for clear eyes, versus cloudy eyes, in order to spot fresh fish.
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