NOAA estimates that about 80 percent of the seafood Americans ate in 2023 came from foreign imports. The main federal barrier standing between a contaminated shipment and a supermarket case is a system almost no shopper has heard of, and two of its seafood entries were refreshed this week.
The mechanism is called detention without physical examination. When the FDA has enough history on a company or a region, it can hold incoming shipments at the port without testing each one, and put the burden on the importer to prove the product is clean before it is released.
