(Sockeye has a deeper red-orange hue.) Or maybe you’d notice the disparity in the thickness of fillet.
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If you’ve recently ordered Alaskan salmon while dining out, what you ate may have not been wild salmon after all.
While diners might be able to spot the deep reddish-pink flesh of wild sockeye salmon, wild king salmon and farmed salmon can look very similar. It’s also significantly more expensive.
Most often, Atlantic farmed salmon was falsely marketed as wild salmon, and restaurants mislabeled this fish much more frequently than grocery stores and retail markets. The results of the survey came after 82 samples of salmon collected in Virginia, Washington, Chicago and New York in the winter of 2013-2014 underwent DNA testing.
The fraud varied from mislabeling the farm fish as wild, claiming it was Alaskan or from the Pacific but really from the Atlantic (as proven by DNA testing), and whether the samples were labeled as the wrong kind of salmon, such as “Chinook”. Sounds like a no-brainer, but this latest survey was done during winter and turned up much more mislabeling than an earlier survey taken during salmon season. A new study from Oceana reveals widespread mislabeling of salmon, too. But the jump isn’t being attributed to a sudden increase in unabandoned label swapping, rampant menu hijinks or differences in sample size.
It may not actually be the salmon described, according to a new report from conservation and advocacy group, Oceana. Twenty percent of salmon from groceries was incorrectly identified, the group found.
“U.S. fishermen catch enough salmon to satisfy 80% of our domestic demand, 70% of that catch is then exported instead of going directly to American grocery stores and restaurants”, she adds.
“When consumers opt for wild-caught United States salmon, they don’t expect to get a farmed or lower-value product of questionable origins”.
And Warner says it’s an environmental problem for those consumers who go the extra mile to consult seafood sustainability ratings like the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, which ranks seafood as “best choice”, “good alternative” or “avoid”. Researchers note that time period was when wild salmon was in season.
Beth Lowell, Oceana’s senior campaign director and an author of the study, said that because fraud can happen anywhere in the supply chain, protective measures need to address all entry points, and not just the final point of sale.
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There is also a higher risk of farm-raised fish being contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), synthetic chemicals which may be in their food, Warren says.
