A Boston Globe study of over a hundred Boston-area seafood
restaurants found that 48 percent of the fish was mislabeled.
When asked about the discrepancies, some restaurant owners
shrugged saying that everyone does it. The most common kinds of
fraud are mislabeling a fish as wild when it’s not, such as
salmon, or selling a completely different fish than the one
named, for instance selling a rockfish as a red snapper. In the
high priced world of caviar from threatened sturgeon, fraud
exists on several levels, from directly misrepresenting the fish
as farmed when it’s actually wild to counterfeit labels on the
fish or the caviar tins. Seafood fraud not only cheats consumers
but it could also adversely affect catch data that form the
basis of sustainable fisheries management. In some cases,
seafood fraud could undermine healthy choices. Consumer reports
found many samples labeled as grouper were in fact tilefish,
which contains much more mercury than grouper. The Food and Drug
Administration recommends that preg