
1 in 5 Seafood Samples Is Fake, Report Finds - smb06
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/science/seafood-samples-mislabelling.html
======
dandandans
I don't think it's a coincidence that these fake food articles—truffle oil,
olive oil, seafood—are springing up after Larry Olmsted recently published
Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do
about It.

Olmsted exposes rampant fraudulent labeling and deceptive practices in the
food industry, including Parmesan cheese, olive oil, truffle oil, seafood
(salmon, snapper, white tuna, shrimp), Kobe beef, and more.

I'm about halfway through the book, and it's shocking. It's definitely changed
how I shop for certain food and what I order in restaurants.

~~~
lbenes
How can our government be failing us so miserably? Ensuring that our food is
safe and properly labeled should be the most basic duties of a government. And
yet they are failing us miserably. In April of 2011, a paper was published
showing that 69% of store-bought olive oil was fake,[1] and yet the government
has done practically nothing to protect us.

In 2013, there was the Salmonella Heidelberg outbreak causing deadly brain
absences in children and making hundreds sick. But nothing was done for over a
year.[2] Instead of fixing the problems here, the government reacts by
allowing China to process our chicken making the problem that much harder
trace.[3]

We’ve let Industry and lobbyists take our democracy from us with their super
pacs and regulatory capture. When are people going to get fed up with this and
demand that our government starts protecting us instead of the industry?

[1]
[http://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/files/report041211fi...](http://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/files/report041211finalreduced.pdf)

[2] [http://www.laweekly.com/restaurants/foster-farms-finally-
rec...](http://www.laweekly.com/restaurants/foster-farms-finally-recalls-
chicken-sort-of-4829157)

[3] [https://www.davidwolfe.com/usda-shipping-chickens-china-
proc...](https://www.davidwolfe.com/usda-shipping-chickens-china-processing/)

~~~
hiou
Something something free markets fix everything.

~~~
refurb
Hmmmm.... The gov't has done nothing at this point, yet someone discovered
there were fake foods, shared the information and consumers are now aware and
avoiding them.

So yeah, I'd say the free markets are working.

~~~
Cpoll
And it only took a few decades. And every time there's some major olive oil
scandal, we don't end up with less adulterated olive oil.

I don't have an opinion on free vs. regulated, but I wouldn't agree that free
markets are working the way you claim.

~~~
refurb
Well, it looks like the free markets moved faster than the gov't in this case.

------
glup
There's industry-level misrepresentation at play here, not just nefarious one-
offs by the local fishmonger. On the Pacific coast of the US many retailers
(whole foods, etc.) sell fish from the genus Sebastes ("rockfish") as "pacific
snapper," though it isn't in Lutjanidae (snappers). From what I've gathered,
this practice is old enough that many of the fishermen don't know it isn't
what people on the East Coast would consider a snapper.

Having grown up on the Gulf, I was amazed how cheap snapper was the first time
I bought it, then promptly disappointed by how bad it was by comparison.

------
MrJagil
As I said in the last fake food thread, this seems to be a problem tech can
help solve. If big-brands fake their olive oil, it _should_ be easy to look
up. Luckily computers are really good at indexing. A site where brands are
rated (rotten tomatoes), and where you can look up groceries (actually, there
are already some barcode scanning apps right?) for a 'true' ingredients list.

Sites like these hopefully ride the wave of public frustration and when the
fake-food debacle quiets down, it becomes a more regular sort of rating site
(i've often wondered which olive oil tastes best, but hard to compare 12
brands when it takes a month to finish 1 bottle)

------
DominikPeters
"The biggest impostor, fittingly, was farmed Asian catfish, a fish with white
flesh that is easily disguised when it’s filleted and drenched in sauce. It
was sold in place of 18 types of more expensive fish, including perch, cod and
grouper."

This is especially concerning for people who try to avoid farmed fish (to
minimize inflicting suffering). Farmed catfish has an incredibly high
suffering/kg ratio, 6x that of salmon, 30x that of chicken meat, and 1000x
that of beef.

[http://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-
is-c...](http://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-
various-animal-foods/)

~~~
logfromblammo
What's the SI unit for suffering? How do you calibrate your measurement
instruments?

If you have a genuine ethical objection to causing suffering to other living
creatures, you can be vegan, lacto-vegetarian, or you can eat meat certified
as _jhatka_ by a trusted authority. It is never necessary for you to compare
suffering ratios.

If you truly want to minimize the pain you send out into the world, it's zero.
That is an easily achievable number. Go vegan. Be kind to everyone. Good luck
on your path to enlightenment. If you aren't going for zero, why would you
bother half-assing it?

For the record, I don't care whether or not my meal has ever screamed in
agony. I can still respect the beliefs of those who do care. But I also don't
wish to hear any of them preach to me about it, or let them trick me into
enduring some sort of ideological sales pitch.

~~~
mturmon
If you re-read the comment above, you will see that it is not preaching. It is
careful to say "for people who try to ... minimize inflicting suffering" \--
leaving room for those (like you) who don't care.

Further, I think you are creating an unhelpful dichotomy between zero and
nonzero. This dichotomy is not necessary.

It is reasonable to try to reduce suffering, but not drive it to zero
(whatever that might imply). Perhaps there's more to the cost function (e.g.,
endangered species), or perhaps one is skeptical (like you seem to be) that
you can measure suffering precisely enough to drive it to zero.

You say zero is easily achievable, but I doubt this. One can argue that the
migrant labor that picked your carrots suffered, or that tiny insects were
harmed in harvesting your vegetables (not a strawman:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism)).
I'm not advocating that position, but I do claim that "zero" is not easily
achievable, if you look carefully.

~~~
logfromblammo
If I look _too_ carefully, I see a slightly contagious, very mild, and benign
form of insanity.

If you see suffering everywhere you look, the real problem may be in your way
of seeing things.

But since suffering (in this context) is an essentially subjective thing, you
can't go mixing it with an objective measurement like kilograms and make it
more objective. Drawing up a "suffering per kilogram ratio" is exactly as
subjective as simply asking whether cows suffer more than fish in the process
of becoming human food. It isn't useful to anyone, except possibly those who
published the ratios, being little more than an organized expression of their
opinions.

The implication I draw from the very existence of a suffering/kg ratio is that
those who invented it must believe that there is an acceptable level of
suffering that any one person may cause, and that ratio may be a useful tool
for staying under that threshold. That's like starting every morning by
swearing into the mirror that you won't make any more than two people cry
today. If it really is valuable to you that you don't make people cry, why
wouldn't you say you don't want to do that to anyone, ever? It may be
inevitable that it happens, but a practically unachievable goal is still a
goal.

~~~
mturmon
"...those who invented it must believe that there is an acceptable level of
suffering that any one person may cause..."

I'd suggest that quantity is one thing to put into the multi-objective
optimization problem we all are unconsciously solving. If you choose to
interpret it as a threshold, that's OK, but others might treat it differently.

In particular, your construction of "won't make any more than two people cry
today" is pure straw man based on your invented threshold rule.

Here's a different analogy. The speed limit on my drive to work today is 65
mph. I drove 70 most of the way. I don't have a hard rule that I can go at
most 5 mph over the speed limit, but I do look at [my_speed - limit] as a
factor in my driving, and try to keep this difference reasonably small.

~~~
logfromblammo
But do you consider "reasonably small" in relation to the magnitude of the
posted limits? Do you drive 30 mph when the posted limit is 25? If not, you
might be interested in "speeding ratios".

But in order to really fit the speeding analogy around animal suffering, you
also have to live in a world where speedometers and radar measurement devices
don't exist. You're speeding if anyone thinks you might be going faster than
the limit, even if nobody can really know for certain.

We don't have any animal suffering meters, or posted limits. We know a limit
exists, but we apparently don't know where exactly to draw the line. Clearly,
a puppy mill that abuses its livestock and runs pit fights will get the
operator thrown in jail. But a battery farm that slices the beaks off of
chickens and crams them into cages too small for them to stand in will get ag-
gag laws that protect the owners from both punishment and scrutiny. Dogs are
cuter than chickens, and less marketable as food, you see. In that world--the
world we live in--a suffering per kilogram ratio is just pissing into the
wind.

------
notadoc
I recall a recent article on much of olive oil being counterfeit. It made me
think how easy it would be to dupe other foods, and I suspect a lot of food is
fake or falsely labeled.

How easy would it be to pass a regular banana off as an organic banana? How
easy is it to label one thing as something else? Makes you think a bit.

~~~
noobermin
Here's another perspective on it, how often will you notice? If you don't then
does it matter?

Before I seem contrarian, I will note that I love sashimi, and of course I can
tell the difference between tuna and salmon sashimi. I don't want to think I
have a dull tongue, but other times, when I'm just hungry, I don't care. I see
the point of worrying about being _ripped off_ when thinking you are buying
high end fish, but if I buy cheap fish in a meal from a stall, I don't really
expect much in the way of authenticity, so I'm not sure I would care. Perhaps
I am just more forgiving.

~~~
StillBored

      Here's another perspective on it, how often will you notice? If you don't then does it matter?
    

A few years ago I purchased some olive oil while overseas from an outfit that
was literally running a large machine pressing olives in front of me.

Shocking, the oil actually smelled like olives vs the stuff in the bottle,
which usually smells like nothing. That oil also had a sharp olive taste which
is actually missing from the store purchased stuff as well. There is a bit of
an olive oil industry starting in texas as well, and that stuff when purchased
directly from a farm (orchard?) tastes like olives as well. Makes me wonder if
100% of the olive oil i've been purchasing in the last decade is fake, or per
some of the articles strongly cut.

BTW: Its not a function of the age either AFAIK, I purchased nearly a gallon
when overseas and it lasted me over a year, all the while maintaining the
distinctive smell and taste.

~~~
dragonwriter
"Olive oil" by nature (without even getting into fakes) has a fairly wide
expected gamut -- extra virgin, virgin, refined, and pomace oils (all of which
but the last can be marketed as unqualified "olive oil", though in practice
that generally mean either refined or a blend of mostly refined and some
virgin.)

A place that is doing something like artisanal premium extra virgin olive oil
(which is what it sounds like you were getting) should have _exactly_ the
relation to generic "olive oil" that you describe, even if nothing involved is
fake or adulterated in any way.

Which is not to say a lot of what you are buying as generic "olive oil" might
not be fake (there's plenty of independent reason to suspect that), but what
you describing doesn't really _indicate_ that.

------
vonmoltke
My understanding is that these types of dupes have been going on for decades.
I didn't know about the deceptions in white fish, but my mom has frequently
told me that my grandpa (a Swedish commercial fisherman who emigrated to New
Jersey) often identified shark being sold as swordfish or other muscular, and
more expensive, fish.

~~~
jedmeyers
If you look at the provided Seafood Fraud map, most of the SF Bay Area
'mislabeling' incidents come from one report dated 2008 [1]. So yes, it's at
least 8 years old at this time.

[1]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320708...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320708001328)

~~~
orky56
Very small sample sized and dated. However, we shouldn't extrapolate either
way whether things have improved, stayed the same, or deteriorated.

------
jamespitts
There are technologies being developed with which consumers confirm, with a
high level of reliability, the source of food items and other goods:

[https://www.provenance.org](https://www.provenance.org)

------
Animats
Trout is usually commercial farm-raised trout. Salmon is usually farm-raised
salmon. Beyond that, one wonders.

------
vermooten
Time to give up fish.

~~~
PieterH
Fish is shit, was a slogan my friend Jan Husar and me came up with.

Fake fish is a real health threat. Farmed fish from SE Asia often contains
liver fluke eggs. If you eat these raw you can get cancer of the bike duct.
See
[http://m.cancer.org/cancer/bileductcancer/detailedguide/bile...](http://m.cancer.org/cancer/bileductcancer/detailedguide/bile-
duct-cancer-risk-factors).

That isn't scare mongering. I got this cancer five years ago and now am dying
from it. The only cause I could see that made sense was sushi made from raw
farmed fish.

------
dschiptsov
According to Murphy's law, every imaginable scam will happen.

------
jbpetersen
This is exactly the sort of generally mundane tracking problem that could be
solved beautifully using a blockchain for following the supply chain.

------
aryehof
Given the exponential growth in world human population, who knows how for how
much longer we will be eating any real fish.

~~~
overcast
There is tons of abundant delicious fish out there to eat. The problem is that
people want to eat the popular ones. Plenty of cultures just eat whatever they
catch, and we should too.

------
banach
Solution: eat cheap vegan food. The risk of a fake apple or carrot scandal is
exactly zero.

~~~
ptaipale
Actually, fake apples -- i.e. apples that are not the variety claimed, or
grown in the place or the way advertised -- are a real possibility in some
places. Depends on economic incentives.

[http://www.freshplaza.com/article/120094/China-30-40-procent...](http://www.freshplaza.com/article/120094/China-30-40-procent-
of-imported-fruits-in-the-market-are-actually-fake)

Yes, there's even fake tofu.

~~~
banach
Did not know that! I guess growing at home is the only way to be really sure
what we're eating.

