Cheap fish sold to consumers as high-end product
One in four fish samples misrepresented
Sarah Schmidt, Canwest News Service
Canadian consumers should think twice about paying a premium to eat high-end fish -- because it could actually be a cheap substitute, according to a new cross-country fish investigation spearheaded by high school students.
One-in-four fish samples taken from restaurants, supermarkets and fish markets across the country was mislabelled or misidentified as higher-priced or more desirable fish species, according to University of Guelph biology professor Robert Hanner, who released the results on Wednesday at an international conference in Mexico City.
This means white tuna or red snapper could actually be tilapia, and wild Pacific salmon could be farmed Atlantic salmon.
Fillets marketed as Mediterranean red mullet could really be spotted goatfish, and fish sold as Alaskan halibut might be Atlantic halibut -- considered endangered.
Hanner, along with the Toronto-based Bioscience Education Canada, recruited 166 high-school students from Ottawa, Richmond, B.C., Edmonton, Saskatoon, Guelph, Toronto, Riverview, N.B. and Halifax to collect samples from the frozen food aisle of large grocery stores, fish markets and restaurants in their communities.
"We were collecting lots of salmon and tuna," said Wennie Walker, a biology teacher at Richmond Secondary School, whose students ventured into shops on Granville Island in Vancouver and sushi restaurants in Richmond.
"We tried to go where people thought they would be buying expensive fish."
The 500 samples collected nationally, including by students from All Saints Catholic high school in Ottawa, were genetically tested at the Barcode for Life DNA database in Guelph, Ont., an international collaboration of scientists from 25 countries to genetically identify all the fish species in the world. Mislabelling was detected in all regions surveyed, said Hanner, co-ordinator for the Fish Barcode of Life initiative.
The findings of the national market survey are consistent with results published last year involving a smaller study of 96 fish samples from restaurants and markets in Toronto and New York City. Hanner said the national survey, designed to determine the percentage in Canada of fish sold as another species and to engage young people in science, was less tightly controlled, but the results point to a cross-country problem of consumer fraud.
This likely occurs during processing and distribution, not at the retail level or at the dockside with fishermen, he said.