Think you know what fish is in your sushi? Think again

Sushi bars and shops are regularly mis-selling exotic species of fish to unwitting British customers, according to new research.

In cases cited in the report, customers thought they were buying a fish from the Atlantic when it was really a tropical variety, while many fish were sold under a generic name that revealed little about where they came from. Some of the species were endangered, while others were so rare that little was known about their population size. The findings suggest that an increasingly complex and globalised food supply chain is open to abuse, putting exotic species at risk.

“This is about transparency,” said Professor Stefano Mariani, a conservation geneticist at Salford University, who, along with his colleague, Cristina di Muri, presented the study at the 50th Anniversary Symposium of the Fisheries Society of the British Isles at Exeter University earlier this month. “People don’t know what they are buying. There is now a huge trade in lesser-known species that have not been assessed. We are talking about hundreds of species of fish. We found they are just not being correctly labelled. Imagine how impossible it is for a consumer to make an informed purchasing decision.”

The pair tested samples from grocery shops in Liverpool and Manchester. They found fish labelled as red snapper, a tropical fish used in Caribbean cooking, was actually redfish, a cold water Atlantic species. Some labelled mackerel turned out to be either Indian mackerel, which is found in the Red Sea and Polynesia, or hilsa shad, a type of tropical herring mostly found around the Indian and Arabian peninsulas. Fish labelled as croaker, which is popular in African dishes, turned out to be any one of four varieties that come from as far away as Japan and Indonesia.

Full story at http://bit.ly/2uL8WQU

Source: The Guardian

 

 

 

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