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Battling Fish Fraud With DNA Testing
itwbennett writes "High demand, high prices, and nearly identical cheaper alternatives is a recipe for fraud. Eel fraud, that is. This has led Japanese researchers to develop a method to cheaply and quickly batch-test DNA by taking small tissue samples from thousands of eels. 'If a non-local eel is found in a batch, more tests will be performed to find the guilty foreigner.'"
"My hovercraft is full of eels."
"DNA testing proves you're lying."
(being led away in handcuffs) "It's a fair cop."
Ezekiel 23:20
Seems like an eel-conceived idea to me.
While I don't disagree with you points about the FDA-Bullshit and it's ability to fail tremendously the past 5 years, I really think you're off-base completely one-siding it to a "Republican" problem. It's an American problem, which includes the Dems, Repubs, Greens or whatever-you-have-it. The real problem is that both sides know you will "fight" for a side so that you keep ignoring the transfer of power from citizens to that of boards and cronies of the elected few.
Hmmm, if the bad guys sell a piece of a more common fish passing it off as a rarer (sometimes endangered) species, is it necessarily 100% wrong? Doesn't it decrease the price of the rarer fish, thus decreasing the drive of fishermen to hunt it? It's not like the people eating it would die from different taste. (But what do I know, being a man of simple tastes...)
Ezekiel 23:20
That's not true, the color comes from the same pigment astaxanthin. The amount in the feed determines the color and can be tailored by the farm. Admittedly farmed salmon is horrible and is a bit like raising lions for food...
This sounds a lot like fraud in the wine business, where a relatively cheap wine is relabeled as an expensive wine.
Both in the fish market, and in the wine market, taste tests show that consumers generally can't tell the difference. If consumers were smart, they would have chosen the cheaper product in the first place. However, consumers are often more concerned about the image of the product than the product itself, so they buy the effectively identical more expensive product.
Yes, the fraud is wrong, but I can't say I feel that horrible about it, as the consumer is still effectively getting what they pay for--something expensive that tastes just like something cheap. Perhaps the resources would be better spent worrying about crimes with real victims.
In Japan the opposite was happening just as frequently. The endangered accidentally caught fish was being sold as a commonly available fish.
Rod Taylor