Here’s a seafood shocker. According to an analysis by the Guardian newspaper, nearly 40 percent of 9,000 seafood products were mislabeled by restaurants, supermarkets, markets, and fishmongers in more than 30 countries.
These findings have exposed seafood fraud on a global scale. Here are five things Black America should know.
Seafood from Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand were found to be mislabeled. The U.K. and Canada had the highest rates of mislabeling at 55 percent, followed by the U.S. at 38 percent.
Black men and women consume nearly twice as much seafood as whites, according to a 2014 study on intake of seafood in the U.S. by age, income, education, race and ethnicity.
“Why do black people love seafood do much?” a Twitter user asked. “Crab legs, shrimp, lobster.. is it the taste or the cost that appeals? I was raised SDA so we weren’t allowed to eat shellfish, so I never really got that either.”
Black Americans have a long history in the fishing industry and seafood has become part of Black American culture. “It’s our heritage,” another Twitter user wrote. “The ocean and rivers has an abundance of food which, for a long period of time, wasn’t expensive. Shrimp and lobster were known a poor people’s food some years back. Couple that with a nucleus of enslaved Africans existing in port areas, it was only natural.”
In the mislabeled seafood analysis, the Guardian found that sometimes products were labeled as different species in the same family. In Germany, for example, 48 percent of tested samples sold as king scallops were, in fact, the less coveted Japanese scallops.
But there was also intentional mislabeling of endangered or vulnerable species. And in some cases, samples were not entirely of aquatic species, with prawn balls sold in Singapore found to contain pork and no prawn.
Since fish is among the most internationally traded food commodities, it is highly susceptible to mislabeling, which is relatively easy and profitable to carry out, The Guardian reported.
“Fish laundering” is often tied to illegal, unreported, and unregulated catches by large “distant” fleets, in which vessels operate off the coasts of Africa, Asia, and South America.
“Often, the catches are processed onboard large transshipment vessels, where mislabeling and mixing of legal and illegal fish is done in relative secrecy. The risk of getting caught is low because monitoring and transparency is weak along the seafood supply chain,” The Guardian reported.
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