Fish or Foul

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Wallet cards and eco labels, though great tools, are only a beginning. One of the most effective measures for empowering consumers would also be the simplest to enact: Policy makers need to demand increased transparency from the dangerously opaque seafood industry. As long as consumers are kept in the dark about where their fish comes from, they will never be able to make sound purchasing decisions.

When is the last time you saw a can of tuna that told you how the fish inside was caught? Tuna canners, in Europe and North America, are not even required to tell consumers what species is in the can, not even what ocean it came from. For obvious reasons, seafood sellers don’t want to disclose any more information than they have to; an informed consumer might be inclined to avoid canned albacore tuna caught in the eastern Pacific, where purse seines scoop up sea turtles, or fish sticks made with cod that came from the pirate-infested Barents Sea.

At the very least, labeling standards need to meet those in Japan. Supermarkets need to inform their clients whether fish is wild-caught or farm-raised, whether it is being sold preserved, previously frozen, or fresh, and, most importantly, where it was caught (or, if it was farmed, where it was raised). A package should mention the method of capture—whether it was caught by hand-line, in a trap, or by a trawl.

Not knowing what species we’re eating, where it came from, and how it was caught or raised also endangers consumers’ health. The flesh of some common fish, we now know, can be toxic. Farmed salmon can contain dangerously high levels of carcinogenic dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls. Two meals of long-lived wild fish such as halibut or swordfish in less than 24 hours can more than double the amount of mercury in an adult’s blood.

In spite of these risks, fish and seafood are inspected much less rigorously than even the cheapest sides of beef. There is no Food and Drug Administration, British Food Standards Agency, or Canadian Food Inspection Agency seal of approval for seafood; in most jurisdictions, processing plants are inspected only once a year.

Retailers routinely pass off farmed salmon as wild-caught. The cheap shrimp found on fast-food menus is frequently treated with antibi­otics. Scallops (as well as shrimp and even wild salmon) are soaked in sodium tripolyphosphate, a suspected neuro­toxicant used in paint strippers, to keep them from drying out in transit. High-grade tuna is treated with carbon monoxide to prevent it from turning brown; you can leave it in a car trunk for a year, and it will still be lollipop red.

In the absence of strong laws demanding accurate labeling, what’s a seafood lover to do?

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