61–70 of 103 posts
I agree this is important but I already saw it my feed and is not hacker related
Perhaps, given the dire state of tuna supplies and consumers who apparently cannot tell the difference without resorting to testing, we should be encouraging mislabeling. Insisting on a particular rare fish while another more common fish satisfies you just as well is exceptionally silly. Of course it is near impossible to convince consumers of this, but business owners have apparently figured out a solution themselve…
Around Chicago we have problems with Asian carp making their way closer and closer to the great lakes. I've often suggested they be renamed 'river tuna' and our problems will be solved.
Kentucky Tuna.
The shocking depletion of the world's fisheries over the last century and a half is one of the great tragedies of our modern civilization. We're causing mass extinction on a level we have to go back to the fossil record to see. We're eating fish that was previously thrown back or used as bait, often just giving it bogus pretty names (like Chilean Sea Bass). I live in the US for now but having grown up in Europe I und…
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Almonds, chickpeas? I love them both but they're no substitute if your diet requires a decent amount of protein.
Pretty sure almonds are nearly the same amount of protein per ounce as tuna..
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Well, I can't really speak to that but I assume the FDA can. If escolar is too dangerous to label as Tuna I am sure they can find other fish that are not. If they okay a fish substitution, I am happy.
You're making a gross assumption if you think the FDA is worried about things like this. Fish mislabeling has been reported as far back as 2005 and nothing has changed. The FDA is overworked and underfunded. They have their hands full regulating an industry that is constantly out-maneuvering them. Between the drug lobbyists and the supplement industry, we're lucky we have any resources left to dedicate to food safety…
Food labeling is already a part of what the FDA overviews, so they won't have to make a new department or some shit to issue a new rule about labeling a few fish.
I am not proposing that the FDA go test fish and make sure nobody is mislabeling things. Inspector incompetence isn't an issue for this proposal since additional inspections would be unnecessary. I am proposing that the FDA adopt an official policy of turning a blind eye to the mislabeling of fish (while issuing some minimal safety guidance). If they do this right, it would actually reduce the amount of work they are suppose to be doing.
The fact that the FDA is overworked, fatigued, and disinterested is one of the reasons this is a good idea.
FDA overwork and disinterest would be a concern if I wanted to force people to correctly label fish. I want the opposite, I want the status quo to be officially endorsed.
This is a link to the actual study. Page 16 is relevant.
http://oceana.org/sites/default/files/reports/National_Seafo...
The group tested 114 tuna samples. Of those 114, 66 were of a fish that the vendor was calling "White Tuna". Have you ever eaten something called White Tuna? Neither have I. It's a fairly unpopular sushi fish sold sparsely around the country.
Why does it make up more half the sample, you might ask? Well, it turns out there is essentially no such thing as White Tuna. Hence 94% of the samples are "mislabeled." [the authors assert that a certain type of albacore tuna sold in a certain form counts as 'white tuna', which accounts for the 6% of correct labels] If your goal was to achieve a result which shows lots of mislabeling, a good strategy would be to considerably oversample 'white tuna'.
They took 48 more samples of tuna other than 'white tuna'. Notably, that didn't include anything from a can, which is by a WIDE margin what most americans think of when they think of tuna. Nevertheless, of those 48, they determined that five were "mislabeled" due to the tuna actually being a substituted variety of tuna. In other words, all 48 were 'tuna', though perhaps not 'albacore' or the specific type it claimed to be.
So where does that leave us? More than half of the samples were of a fish known to be commonly "mislabeled" by standard industry practice, and the rest of the mislabelings were substitutions of one type of tuna for another. In no universe does that lead to the conclusion that 59% of the tuna Americans consume is not actually "tuna". I would venture that no one reading this comment has ever eaten a piece of tuna that was not actually from a tuna fish (though _maybe_ they lied about which specific variety you were eating).
This organization has a history of running biased studies and then churning out ridiculous charts and headlines to push on local newspapers. They ran with a version of this story in New York City around a year ago. It's nonsense. Eat your tuna and enjoy it.
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I've surely eaten it many times before without knowing and have been fine. Regardless, an FDA approved list of fish substitutes would be a good idea and would resolve this concern.
I have eaten it, had trouble, and didn't put two and two together until I read an article explaining the phenomenon of fish mislabeling. SO...maybe go do an experiment: Go eat a nice big portion of escolar (nee "white tuna") and report back. For science.
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I attribute the tragedy to the fact we farm the soil for ages, grow cattle for as much as long, but fishing was always considered cheap, given the sheer size of the ocean (we're far past the regeneration point), when in fact, fish has the biggest potential of all for intensive farming. Fish farming already is a booming industry in some countries, and the tendency is to double in the next decade. There's a lot to impr…
It's worth noting that, in the United States a at least, there is a strong anti-farmed fish movement coming from the environmentalist community. They like to point out all of the damage that fish farming does to a local ecology without acknowledging the much greater damage that catching wild fish does. As a result, there is a lot of hesitation among some consumers to purchase farmed fish.
If you want an environmentally friendly wild fish, I'd recommend Mahi Mahi. They are the rats of the ocean. There are times when you can't get away from them.
My family has been part of the seafood business in North America for almost 30 years, and I definitely have the ability to distinguish between fish species just by looking at flesh.
This article makes no attempt to distinguish between what sushi bars label as 'tuna' and 'white tuna'.
Order 'tuna' and you're almost always going to get tuna. Order 'white tuna' and you're almost always going to get escolar/albacore.