Bait and Switch in the Seafood Section?

You might not be getting what you paid for in the seafood section of your grocery store. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… a new study has found some fish are being sold in the guise of others:

Transcript

You might not be getting what you paid for in the seafood section of your
grocery store. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports a new
study has found some fish are being sold in the guise of others:


A new study finds cheaper fish are being sold as ‘red snapper.’ Amy Moran at
the University of North Carolina is a co-author of the study published in
Nature
. She says DNA tests showed three-fourths of the ‘red snapper’
filets they tested from grocery stores were actually other species. Moran says
consumers are being deceived a couple of ways:


“The public perception of how common these species are is obviously influenced
by how common they appear to be on the marketplace. And if you go to the
grocery store and see Red Snapper everywhere and it’s $6.95 a pound, you can
rightly assume that it’s fairly common. But if what you’re getting is something
different, it’s going to lead to some public misapprehension of how common these
species are and that may at some level affect policy.”


Because less valuable fish are being reported as ‘red snapper’ catches,
fisheries managers are fooled into overestimating the population of the fish,
contributing to over-harvesting.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.