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Restaurants Plan DNA-Certified Seafood Program
Restaurants across the globe will soon use DNA technology to reassure customers that they are getting what they pay for. In recent years getting "counterfeit" seafood has become a big problem. In 2007 several people became seriously ill from eating illegally imported pufferfish that had been mislabeled as monkfish. From the article: "David Schindel, a Smithsonian Institution paleontologist and executive secretary of the Washington-based Consortium for the Barcode of Life, said he has started discussions with the restaurant industry and seafood suppliers about utilizing the technology as a means of certifying the authenticity of delicacies. 'When they sell something that's really expensive, they want the consumer to believe that they're getting what they're paying for,' Schindel told The Associated Press."
I hate it when I pay top dollar for blue whale and they serve me inferior dolphin.
Personally I think we should encourage counterfeit seafood; for example, find an indistinguishable but sustainable substitute for shark fin and that's a good thing, I won't lose any sleep over social-climbing Chinese middle class consumers thinking they're buying genuine shark fins when they're not.
Nuff' said.
A proud member of the Onion-in-Hand alliance
You damn well know what he is talking about. Claiming something was raised "organically" in the popularly understood sense of the word is quite profitable to abuse due to the fact that many people will pay more for it.
Good point sir!
On another note though, there may be some ambiguity. Some relatives visited from Luxembourg, and I recall at one family dinner we made a big deal about the produce being pesticide free, and the meat being free of artificial hormones, etc. When we explained the term was "organic", our guests spat out their food and all reached for their wine simultaneously, as they exclaimed "you grow all your food in shit?". As it turns out, they use the term "biologique" or maybe "organic-biologique". Very amusing dinner conversation.
I eat only free-range vegetables
rewriting history since 2109
One word: allergies
For instance, I personally am allergic to ordinary boned fish, but don't have a problem with shelled fish. So if I order crab, it's important to me to know that it's actually crab, and not imitation crab, because one will make me sick, and the other won't.
It isn't so much that what was once rubbish is now considered fine dining, but rather that due to multiculturalism, many foods that were once unpopular in a foreign country are being driven by populations that are made up of many more nationalities.
Actually, it's not so much about "fine dining" as the cycle of once-populous varieties being overfished almost to the point of extinction, forcing the mass-market fisheries to switch to different kinds of fish. The orange roughy craze of a few years ago was a fine example. You wouldn't have seen orange roughy on menus in the 70s or earlier; it's a variety of fish commonly called a "slimehead," and it's really ugly-looking, something like an angler fish. It also doesn't taste like much. That's why they marketed it as a "fine dining" fish, even though it's pretty easy to catch in huge amounts by deep trawling -- because they needed to trump up some reason why you'd actually eat it. Explain away that bland taste as "subtle, delicately flavored flesh," ship the fish to stores already filleted (so the customer never sees the whole fish), and never mention the word "slimehead," and it becomes the new market darling. Of course, as it turned out, orange roughy can live for over 100 years and they don't even begin breeding until they're 20 or 30, so they're incredibly susceptible to overfishing. Hence why you hardly ever see this "miracle fish" on menus anymore;10-15 years into the "craze" and the supplies are already dangerously depleted. On to the next fish.
Breakfast served all day!
The problem with the man in the middle is the man in the middle. If I don't trust a restaurant to serve me the seafood I want, how can I trust them to not falsify the DNA information? This is an absolutely stupid idea and does nothing to "reassure" people. Stop insisting you want $5.99 all you can eat lobster, and eat somewhere decent for a change. Until you can bring your own independent rapid-test kit and do your own test before your food gets cold, guess what - you still have to trust the damned restaurant.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
They give you a piece of paper that says it's authentic, but there is nothing that ties the paper to the diamond. And why should we trust "they" either? We all know that it's all a racket with the De Beers cartel keeping diamonds off the market to prop up the price and we should trust them to give us a piece pf paper that has some sort of truth on it? We can manufacture bigger and better diamonds than natural ones, and even CZ are hard to tell from diamonds except by their unnatural perfection.
Now the fish market has taken a cue from De Beers. They're going to do DNA sequencing and print a certificate to identify species, but what restaurant goers know which species of fish they want to eat and which they don't? It's like the jewelry store showing you a diamond under a microscope. You get the illusion that you know something, but you don't really know if you're even looking at a diamond. And how does the paper DNA test report "attach" to the fish it came from?
Next it will be wine-marketing- "this particular fish was caught by Mr. X, a 5th generation fisherman, at great risk to his life and limb, and was caught in 234' of water in the Bering sea at 2:37am yesterday. It was prepared by Mr. Y, a fourth generation chef who has studied under Mr. Z for 14 years before finally being allowed to do more than cut vegetables. It was seasoned with the essence of ptanga from Zanzibar..." etc. Today it's on special for only $342.
The bullshit will just keep piling higher and higher until only the 1% can afford to eat fish.