Sushi bars are committing “seafood fraud” by serving customers the wrong fish, a study has found.
Researchers examined labelling practices in restaurants and found that in many cases fish was being mislabelled, or not labelled at all. Stefano Mariani, a conservation geneticist at Salford University, who presented his work to the Fisheries Society of the British Isles, said: “This is about transparency. People don’t know what they are buying. There is now a huge trade in lesser-known species that have not been assessed. Imagine how impossible it is for a consumer to make an informed purchasing decision.”
In a separate study, Professor Mariani found that about 10 per cent of fish sold in sushi bars was of a species different from that labelled. “The suppliers are the main culprits because they know where the fish come from. The shopkeepers don’t have that knowledge,” he said.
Mislabelling can endanger health. Escolar labelled as white tuna, for instance, can naturally contain a toxin that causes gastrointestinal problems. It is banned in Italy and Japan. Mislabelling can also disguise and fund illegal and unregulated fishing, The Observer reported. “The supply chain is now so complicated. It . . . spreads out across so many middle-men. There are so many opportunities for inaccuracy, bad translation and deliberate misreporting,” Professor Mariani said.
Substitution levels in the UK were significantly lower than observed in North America. However, Professor Mariani found that the average British fish-eater could only distinguish two out of six common fish. About half could tell a salmon from a mackerel, but only a third could identify cod.