Fish Story
By Meredith Brody
Fanciers of fancy fish, beware. The pricey white tuna sushi you just paid extra for might be inexpensive and lean farm-raised tilapia. The flying fish roe, aka tobiko, adorning your California roll, might very well be the cheaper smelt eggs called masago. And that red snapper on your plate? The chances are good that it’s something else – “Genetic studies have shown, however, that many fish sold as red snapper in the USA are…other species in the family. This kind of seafood mislabeling is probably common with species that suffer from heavy overfishing, and whose stocks are depleted to the point that supply cannot keep up with demand,” says world-weary Wikipedia.
This is not exactly new news. But in a front-page New York Times story reminiscent of the two amateur-detective teens running amok all over New York City in The World of Henry Orient, two intrepid high school senior girls bought sushi and fish fillets in 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores in Manhattan and sent samples off to a Canadian university, who analyzed the fish’s genes and found that 23% were mis-labeled.
The story behind the story is that this kind of scientific analysis might someday be possible to perform instantly, in place, with a bar-code-like scanning device. (Possibly a worthwhile investment for sushiphiles, caviar fanciers, or just to make sure that the package of red snapper that the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch would prefer that you not purchase at all is, indeed, red snapper.)
But the pleasure in reading about the girls’ study is in the amateur, in the best meaning of the word, detective work. My favorite sentence? From the mouth of the father of one of the students, who just happens to be a scientist and proponent of DNA barcoding hisownself: “It involved shopping and eating, in which they were already fluent."
Post a Comment
foam order.com