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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

This is a silly list. Not because fish aren't important, but because there's no way to take action on this list. Studies have shown that a huge amount of fish is mislabelled. Yes, pick up a piece of xxxx from a seafood market and the odds are that it's not xxxx.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/science/earth/27fish.html

Consumers have no effective way to verify what they're eating. This is a situation where there is either government action or no action; no private personal actions can be successful, barring the creation of instant cheap at-the-restaurant-table DNA analysis.

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Most of the passing-off is good news from a sustainability perspective. The most common substitute fish are pollock and farmed tilapia, catfish and basa, all highly sustainable. Here in the UK, cod prices are so high that most fish and chip shop menus just list 'fish' where they once listed cod, the generic fish invariably being farmed basa. Most popular processed fish products like fish fingers, breaded fillets and fish pies are using pollock in place of cod or haddock.

The most sustainable fish are the cheapest. If we can move past our fetish for eating apex predators, we can easily solve fish sustainability without the need for regulation.

That's a very interesting link, but saying that we might as well not bother because there's labeling issues is rather overstating the problem. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Did you even read the lede?

>Scientists aiming their gene sequencers at commercial seafood are discovering rampant labeling fraud in supermarket coolers and restaurant tables: cheap fish is often substituted for expensive fillets, and overfished species are passed off as fish whose numbers are plentiful.

The link states that overfished species are being intentionally mis-labelled. I would say that, yes, we might as well not bother if the seafood industry is going to pull these kind of shenanigans, absent some sort of regulation from the government (an unpopular sentiment here).

Well, I'm actually all for government regulation of this kind of thing. In fact, I would argue that this is a wonderful example of a case where government regulation is required for the free market to function: markets depend on a good flow of correct information to function.

absent some sort of regulation from the government

Surely there must be laws against this already. I have a hard time imagining that claiming that you're selling X when you're in actual fact selling Y is legal. If no one is being prosecuted it must be because the government doesn't care enough, not because they lack laws to prosecute under.

It depends probably but I'm sure some areas the name of different foods are imprecise. Does caviar mean all fish eggs? all black fish eggs? Beluga, Ossetra or Sevruga sturgeon eggs? What about True cod. ect.

I think this issue would be well covered by fraud statutes. I don't see how additional regulations are necessary.

Here's an earlier story, with similar conclusions:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/science/22fish.html

And here's a reference to an even earlier story from 2005, in which farmed salmon are substituted for wild (not DNA-checkable):

http://vitalchoice.com/shop/pc/articlesView.asp?id=95

So, 6 years later, we still don't know what we're eating.

The linked article seems to indicate current efforts toward cheaper DNA sampling for use by government regulators. Handheld detectors might be a decade or two away as solid-state DNA chips come of age. I think all that is required is a population that demands a properly labeled and inspected food supply -- I'm bullish about the technology getting there.

Unfortunately, government action is also incredibly limited in what it can do. Tragedy of the commons - all it takes is a few nations that don't subscribe to whatever sustainable fishing agreement is devised, and fishers can fish unsustainably under their flag.

I just want to give a plug here for a very underrated & unknown newspaper; the Saint Petersburg Times. They did tests like this about 5 years ago with similar results, and I believe they were the first investigative reporters who looked into this issue.

Just as we should dismiss the police force because they are not 100% effective, they do not capture all murders and theives, and sometimes convict innocent people.

It would be a better argument if you could talk about the actual odds.

> Consumers have no effective way to verify what they're eating.

Buy whole fish. It's much harder to be lied to when you can look the fish in the eye.

I'd say that the recent prominence of such lists, and articles, means that at least the general population is becoming somewhat aware of the issue. Without that, nothing much is likely to happen.

Perhaps it's difficult to assure you're being given what you're told, but at least people are starting to ask.

And when preservation such as fishing regulations are proposed, this will make sense to more people. Maybe all the more so when they realize that their individual decisions don't matter, aren't sufficient, because they're bing lied to.

I hope. The alternative is pretty dismal.

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