How much should Americans care about the fish on their plates? Namely, whether the type of seafood they've ordered — red snapper at a sushi restaurant, sea bass at a supermarket counter, tuna on a Subway sandwich — is actually the type of fish they're served?
A lot, argue researchers of a new report on seafood fraud from the Vermont Law School's Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS). Due to the complexity and opacity of global seafood supply chains, and challenges for NGOs and scientists to examine them comprehensively, estimates of fraud vary wildly, from 16.5 to 75% of all fish imported into the U.S. Nevertheless, "Seafood is an industry where we really see the problem of food fraud occurring on a wide scale," says Emily Spiegel, the report's co-author.
