Think You Bought Red Snapper? Don’t Be So Sure
wsj.com
wsj.com
I tend to not like it when restaurants try to pass off one fish for another to me. In the Caribbean a restaurant gave me marlin instead of sword. I think just about anyone would be able to tell the difference since sword can be a much much softer flesh fish.
I lived in the Caribbean where my grandfather depended on the sea. Fishing for a living. He caught only these reef fishes.
My father a retired sea captain, bought a fishing boat and fished mainly yellow fin tuna but of course marlin and sworn would end up on his lines as by catch.
I think a lot of people here in the Caribbean who still eat fish would be able to differentiate between cooked fish.
Blue tangs fried are my favourite reef fish...sorry Dory.
Fish, shrimp, olive oil, Parmesan, balsamic...
Shrimp is so bad that Olmsted rarely eats it. “I won’t buy it, ever, if it is farmed or imported,” he writes. In 2007, the FDA banned five kinds of imported shrimp from China; China turned around and routed the banned shrimp through Indonesia, stamped it as originating from there, and suddenly it was back in the US food supply.
At restaurants I don't think I've ever seen imported shrimp (don't really eat at chain restaurants). I'll have to pay closer attention to the source in the frozen bags I buy from the grocery.
Honey, tea and spices of unknown origins are also frequent targets of dilution in order to boost the margins.
Or even better, go fish, hunt and grow your own. I grew up on salmon my maternal grandpa fished, cod etc. my paternal grandpa fished, smoked salmon my uncle made, moose shot by one of the neighbours, scallops my dad (and later myself) picked while scuba diving, potatoes and carrots either home grown or bought from the farmer down the road, berries picked in the fall by all the family and conserved...
The problem is 99% of people don't give a shit, convenience trumps taste and all else. Take something as simple as bread: anyone can make delicious bread with equipment they already own, at low cost, and it doesn't take a lot of time once you've done it a few times. Yet people buy effing atrocious bread from the supermarket every day. I refuse, I've baked all my own bread for the past 11 years.
It takes 2 minutes before dinner to mix predough, 3 minutes to mix full dough before putting the kids to bed, then 2 minutes putting the breads in the oven and taking them out again after the kids are tucked in. Repeat every four days.
> The problem is 99% of people don't give a shit
This is especially true in the USA, at least according to "The Culture Code" https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Code-Ingenious-Understand-Peo...
Now what about fish eaters? If you can't taste the difference between red snapper and tilapia, why ever buy red snapper? Obviously there are environmental and health reasons to choose one fish species over another, but is that doesn't seem to explicitly be the problem here.
Well, there's absolutely different taste between some species of fish. Nobody would misunderstood a swordfish for tilapia for example.
Now, some fish are more alike in taste, so that one would either not see much difference in picking one over another, or even attribute the difference from what they expected in this particular catch/bunch they bought being blander.
After all, taste can vary between different items of a single species of fish too (depending on where it was caught, how it was raised, what it ate, age, etc.).
Read up on Tilapia farming a bit and you'll never touch the stuff again in your life. The majority of farms pump the frys with hormones to force them all to be males (vs random mix of male/female). This is because males are generally larger, grow faster, and leads to a more uniform product. Not every farm does this (I think there are some in the USA that don't) but the bad apples have poisoned the entire barrel for me. Since I can't tell where it's coming from I won't eat it. Tis a shame too as it's a relatively hardy fish and it can be raised on a purely vegetarian diet.
Taste wise I'm not sure if I could tell the difference between real Grouper and whatever is the knockoff. Would be a fun test to do at home as Grouper tastes awesome. If there's a cheaper substitute that's just as good, I'm all for it!
Bingo.
I have zero moral issue asserting my dominance as the apex predator of this ball of mud to consume any and all prey that my heart desires.
What I do take issue with is not knowing the long term effects of things like high doses of hormones on us (humans). I'm not educated enough in that field to know if my fears are well founded, but my gut tells me I'll be better off not eating Tilapia so I don't have to worry about my dick falling off (or growing a new one!).
I'm trying to imagine how much damage could be wrought at even large amounts of tilapia (at least from the hormonal aspect...).
Delightfully put!
Unfortunately most American fish preparation methods (deep fry, heavy saucing) basically destroys the fish flavor so people may not develop the ability to differentiate.
Of cause "Chinese" restaurants are the quintessential American food joint so they do a lot of deep frying of everything including the fish.
> Another easy tip: Buy American when possible. The U.S. is far and away the world leader in fishery management, safety and sustainability, and fish caught in the U.S., from Alaska to Cape Cod, are better regulated for purity and more likely to be labeled accurately.
How would buying American help if the problem is in B2C companies, which are presumably all local anyway?
While there probably exists a problem with mislabeled seafood, this looks like a propaganda article to me.
Help crowdsource payments for random DNA tests of the food at local stores. Fish and olive oil, to start.
If a group of people know everyone involved and do a round robin for who collects the samples and which lab to send them to, it should be more trustworthy than any alternative.
(The samples need to be sent in without packages, so employees at the testing labs can't call the stores and charge for faking the tests.)
Edit: Hmm, the business opportunity might rather be with automating lab tests..?
They aren't so common I'd imagine -- but I sadly know far too few professional cooks. :-)
Edit: According to my googling, it seems even experts often fail the taste testing of olive oil. I guess you could wait a few decades and see how your arteries are doing -- or use a lab.
It can be, it you buy a kit dedicated for this purpose: https://norgenbiotek.com/product/olive-oil-dna-isolation-kit
A MinION sequencer from Oxford Nanopore is $1000. With this alone (and a kit of chemicals and enzymes to prepare the sample) you can sequence DNA, but sequencing a random piece of DNA may not help you in identifying the animal or plant species used in a food product.
So probably you need to use PCR to amplify a suitable piece of DNA, so you know what you are sequencing. For this you need enzymes, which probably cost in tens or hundreds of dollars for each use, and then in principle you can do PCR "by hand" (I have done this) with the enzymes, some test tubes and 3 water baths kept controlled in certain temperatures. Or buy a machine that cycles the temperature in a controlled manner. They are really just thermal cyclers, but they are commonly known as "PCR machines". You can get a used one for about $1000.
Then at least one micropopipette (surprisingly expensive, almost $200, or buy used) and some glassware etc.
If you have the knowledge, $3000 to $5000 should have you up and running. Some stuff, like enzymes, are consumable, so you need to use more money to restock when the lab is running.
WSJ isn't pay walled if Google is the referrer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
> Publications like NYT, WSJ, the Economist, and the New Yorker have paywalls that leave ways for readers to work around them. Such stories are OK to post to Hacker News. Yes, the workarounds are a nuisance, but the loss of many substantive articles would be worse. In the future, when someone doesn't understand this, please politely direct them to this thread or to HN's FAQ [1], which now makes this explicit.
> Complaints about paywalls are off-topic here.