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Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised this isn't more commonly known. Locally (Australia), there has been recent furore over the 'blueberries' in most foods (including blueberry muffins etc.) not actually being blueberries, but a bluey chemical gel.

Also, a local delicacy, the Barramundi fish is commonly replaced in restaurants with the cheaper, imported, less tasty, commercially raised Nile perch. Same with prawns, where beautiful sea fresh King prawns are being replaced with poor sample raised in Vietnamese sewerage farms.

I believe by law now restaurants and shops have to show the actual name of the fish, plus whether it is local or imported.

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To be honest I'm going to be a slight eco-terrorist right now. (Usually I want to tell commenters like me here to go fornicate with a cactus!) Seafood is being overexploited dramatically. While substituting gel for berries is downright despicable (or wood pulp in meat), substituting unsustainable exploitation with somewhat sustainable (pretty sure those come with a slew of own problems) seafood farms is a good thing.

substituting unsustainable exploitation with somewhat sustainable (pretty sure those come with a slew of own problems) seafood farms is a good thing.

Oh absolutely, but you shouldn't lie about it.

Additionally, most Australians (don't know about the rest of the world) have never eaten an actual scallop.

Mostly they're discs hole-punched from skate wings (a skate's a bit like a stingray)

Here in New Zealand, most of the time when I get scallops they have the orange egg-sac bit still attached.

Is that not the case in Aus?

Sometimes the anonymous white discs will have a bit sliced almost off and coloured with orange food dye. Often not.

You'll see genuine (imported) scallops at markets occasionally, but it's years and years since I saw a restaurant serve the real thing.

Australian. Citation please?

See for yourself - like toomanybeersies says, they should have an orange roe (boys and girls both have them - scallops switch sex as required), attached by some stringy material.

The roe has a flavour and texture different to the white meat of the scallop, which is the muscle used to open and close the shell.

The white meat should have a firm and homogeneous texture - fakes tend to have textured lines through them, but not always.

In the UK, most scampi (a crustacean) is actually monkfish tail.

Skate wing is legitimately tasty. It definitely has a shellfish taste to it, so I can see how you could fool someone into thinking it was a scallop.

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