Two teen girls found out the fish they were getting from stores and restaurants in New York were not the same variety. By testing via DNA, they discovered nearly a quarter are mislabeled as expensive fish varieties.
Kate Stoeckle, 18, and Louis Strauss, 17, classmates from New York’s Trinity School, as part of a school project tested 60 fish samples brought from New York stores and sent them to the University of Guelph in Canada for DNA testing. About 56 samples were identified by the DNA technique, out of which 14 samples were mislabeled.
The stores mislabel them to boost profits and also to hide the fact that some of them are endangered varieties.
Kate Stoeckle was astounded by these results. She told
Reuters: "We never expected these results. People should get what they pay for."
Two samples of filleted fish they bought as red snapper, which is caught mostly from the southeast United States and in the Caribbean, were instead sold the endangered Acadian redfish from the North Atlantic.
The white tuna they bought from a sushi restaurant turned out to be a Mozambique tilapia, a cheaper variety raised in fish farms. Another restaurant sold “Mediterranean red mullet” but the DNA testing showed they were spotted goatfish from the Caribbean.
This is the first time the DNA bar-coding technique was used to identify the fish types.
Stoeckle’s father Mark is an expert in genetic bar coding. This system produces a unique signature of the species’ genes and from the code one can identify the product at the other end.
Louisa Strauss said in the report that authorities should do a routine DNA bar coding of fish to prevent such mislabeling. In the U.S. nearly $70 billion per year is spent on seafood.
The report didn’t name the stores and restaurants that mislabeled since it is hard to prove they knowingly did it or their suppliers deceived them.
Bob Hanner of University of Guelph told Reuters the importance of bar coding system:
It bears on a number of issues -- food safety, fraud and protection of endangered species.
Scientists have so far catalogued bar codes for about 46,000 animal species in
http://www.barcodinglife.org. The bar coders are seeking funds to create five million records from 500,000 animal species by 2014.
It is a great work by the girls identifying the problem and recommending a solution. We may see the same mislabeling patterns in other places and products as well.
