59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna | Hacker News Reader

59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna

theatlantic.com

101 pointsjaequery98 comments

The shocking depletion of the world's fisheries over the last century and a half is one of the great tragedies of our modern civilization. We're causing mass extinction on a level we have to go back to the fossil record to see. We're eating fish that was previously thrown back or used as bait, often just giving it bogus pretty names (like Chilean Sea Bass).

I live in the US for now but having grown up in Europe I understand the situation there better. Nationalistic arguments resting on protecting 'traditional' livelihoods and preserving centuries old fishing villages have been used to continue subsidizing an industry with much larger collective fishing fleet than is possibly justifiable. Of course nowhere in this "tradition" argument is it ever acknowledged that traditionally we used vastly less sophisticated machinery and mechanisms so catches per fisherman were obviously dramatically lower - and we were STILL depleting stocks.

This is no different to any of our resource extraction industries sadly. Give rights to extract resource. Rights holders make tons of money. Use money to pervert political process and buy protection against breaches of law and regulation. Deplete resource. Move on.

The biggest challenge with fishing is the ocean is largely a shared resource. The incentive to preserve and protect is much smaller, because you can just fish in international waters or sneak over to somebody else's waters to fish, and conserving in your own waters may be fruitless because other people will come a'fishin!

Basically, one giant global tragedy of the commons.

Ironically, recreational hunters solved this problem a long time ago. Give people a private plot and a quota and they will make sure populations stay healthy in that plot and surrounding areas. There are more whitetail deer in North America now after these kinds of hunting practices than there were when the first European settlers arrived.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer#Human_interac...

While in general you're right, deer aren't a great example. Deer populations in much of the US are actually higher than they historically would have been, largely because predator populations have been artificially and dramatically constrained. Most deer predators, but especially gray wolves, are also livestock predators, which has justified their population control.

That's basically my point, though. The problem with the ocean is that this sort of solution has not been implemented and may in fact be very difficult to implement. The ocean is difficult to fence off, and the actors are basically states who have no superior authority that can truly enforce such things.

Precisely. No property rights, no desire to preserve property.

I attribute the tragedy to the fact we farm the soil for ages, grow cattle for as much as long, but fishing was always considered cheap, given the sheer size of the ocean (we're far past the regeneration point), when in fact, fish has the biggest potential of all for intensive farming.

Fish farming already is a booming industry in some countries, and the tendency is to double in the next decade. There's a lot to improve yet, specially on small scale and associated with hydroponics, only now we are seeing research into that. If you want to invest, this a good area to put your money.

It's worth noting that, in the United States a at least, there is a strong anti-farmed fish movement coming from the environmentalist community. They like to point out all of the damage that fish farming does to a local ecology without acknowledging the much greater damage that catching wild fish does. As a result, there is a lot of hesitation among some consumers to purchase farmed fish.

The objection is basically this: the desirable fish to farm are mostly meat-eaters. To feed these fish, large quantities of random fish are driftnetted and fed to the fish farms. That is, fish farms are converting 10 or 100 pounds of bait fish into one pound of marketable fish. This method of farming fish WORSENS the ocean depletion problem, it doesn't improve it. It would actually be better to simply fish for tuna directly.

There are objections to farmed salmon. Not even the most hard core environmentalist cares about farmed tilapia or catfish.

If you want an environmentally friendly wild fish, I'd recommend Mahi Mahi. They are the rats of the ocean. There are times when you can't get away from them.

These farmers are exploiting the higher margins of rare species, not scale, otherwise they would be looking after the highly productive species. Regulation would be enough to change the industry.

It's no different than cattle. We're used to red meat but it's actually a wasteful industry that has a huge impact on ecology. We only keep raising cattle because it sells for a premium (red meat is the most expensive source of protein).

The impact of fish farmers that grow carnivore fish is comparable to the impact of destroying native land to farm soy/corn used to feed cattle. We just got used to it. There are other ways though.

I've been in sea fish farms and I'm a spearfisher hobbyst myself.

Beyond the notion that fish farms are a sustainable source of fish meat, the fact is that fish farming needs a fodder supply to feed the fish. Fish eat fish, remember? This means in its majority the fodder produced nowadays comes from wild fish, probably a cheaper one to catch than de one in the farming nets. So wild fish still needs to be catched.

But it's even worse than that. Much worse... In order to grow fish in the farming nets the fish needs to eat much more than its weight in order to grow a little,just like any other animal. This means that it is much more ecological for us to eat the fish that is processed to make fish flour (fodder) than eat the fish that comes from fish farms.

What a nonsense isn't it? But still, we want tuna...

> Beyond the notion that fish farms are a sustainable source of fish meat, the fact is that fish farming needs a fodder supply to feed the fish.

This is not the only model. There are fish, specially freshwater, you can feed on algae and micro crustaceans, which in turn consume organic waste from traditional farming. That's where research is going into, and where fish farming is more promising, not the sea net model.

Tilapia is produced in large scale this way quite successfully, and is a desirable meat that sells for a good price here in Brazil.

Why is farming superior to properly managed wild fisheries? Over fishing is the problem. I don't see farming as the obvious solution. Farmed fish are loaded with toxins, as I understand it. The pollution is also a problem.

Even farming cattle in the way we do it is not really sustainable. There is a strong case to be made that hunted venison should be a staple meat at grocery stores. There is also a strong argument that a lot of farmland should be reverted to bison range and hunted for sale.

> Why is farming superior to properly managed wild fisheries? Over fishing is the problem.

... and over fishing occurs because management of wild stock is clearly not working.

Plus, there's a lot of waste in the chain that is diminished on fish farming.

> Farmed fish are loaded with toxins, as I understand it. The pollution is also a problem.

The toxins in farmed fish, mainly in salmon, are just a reflex of the toxins everywhere in the habitat (pesticides, untreated sewage), bad methods (fish fed with chicken waste) and lack of regulation. It's a non-issue where they don't crap on their own food and do it right (Chilean salmon, for instance).

> Even farming cattle in the way we do it is not really sustainable.

I agree. But the sad truth is that beef and bacon sells, and the planet would be devoid of mammals by tomorrow morning if we switched overnight to hunting game. Human population only got to the current size exactly because we raise cattle (among other things).

On top of that, there are ways to farm native species inside their own habitat, which helps bringing the population levels back to normal, like in your Buffalo example.

> management of wild stock is clearly not working

So fix it. If the USN blew a few ships in treaty violation out of the water things would change quickly.

You can find projections on the web so I'm not going to link here, but even if fishing got 100% regulated we would be past the capacity for the next years (other things factored in, as coastal pollution, desertification of corals and global warming).

A great example is slimehead (Hoplostethus atlanticus), known in the US market by the more familiar name orange roughy. H. atalanticus is very long lived (up to ~150 years) and has a low reproductive rate. Forty years ago orange roughy was not commercially harvested. Today, the species has been so effectively harvested by bottom trawling that in most fisheries, the species has crashed.

Man is it delicious. I was sad to learn it's a bad choice.

This is the primary reason that I think that restricting commercially farming Tilapia on-land, in large scale closed systems, in states like California is ridiculous.

I have been looking at all the amazing open space on the Island of Alameda - where the old Navy base was; I think that a company using the warehouse/open space to create an industrial sized version of Gardenpool.org's closed loop Tilapia setup would be an amazing opportunity.

Just curious, would it help to boycott eating certain fish on the endangered specifies list?

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has seafood watch. This includes iOS and Android apps to check while on the go.

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx

You can also download and print:

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/cr_seafoodwatch/downlo...

"The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program creates science-based recommendations that help consumers and businesses make ocean-friendly seafood choices."

This is great! Exactly what I am looking for.

Not individually, but there are groups who attempt to keep track of which cause the most damage when you eat it. It's not likely to solve the problem in the long run though, because there are a lot of people who just don't care. Personally, I think the world should look to the Iceland model and institute strict quotas across the board.

If you can get another people to do so that fishing them becomes uneconomical.

The renaming trick is also done for meat. The horse/beef meat scandal in Europe shed a little bit of light on what we now call 'meat' which is remains that would have been thrown away before.

This headline is preposterously misleading.

This is a link to the actual study. Page 16 is relevant.

http://oceana.org/sites/default/files/reports/National_Seafo...

The group tested 114 tuna samples. Of those 114, 66 were of a fish that the vendor was calling "White Tuna". Have you ever eaten something called White Tuna? Neither have I. It's a fairly unpopular sushi fish sold sparsely around the country.

Why does it make up more half the sample, you might ask? Well, it turns out there is essentially no such thing as White Tuna. Hence 94% of the samples are "mislabeled." [the authors assert that a certain type of albacore tuna sold in a certain form counts as 'white tuna', which accounts for the 6% of correct labels] If your goal was to achieve a result which shows lots of mislabeling, a good strategy would be to considerably oversample 'white tuna'.

They took 48 more samples of tuna other than 'white tuna'. Notably, that didn't include anything from a can, which is by a WIDE margin what most americans think of when they think of tuna. Nevertheless, of those 48, they determined that five were "mislabeled" due to the tuna actually being a substituted variety of tuna. In other words, all 48 were 'tuna', though perhaps not 'albacore' or the specific type it claimed to be.

So where does that leave us? More than half of the samples were of a fish known to be commonly "mislabeled" by standard industry practice, and the rest of the mislabelings were substitutions of one type of tuna for another. In no universe does that lead to the conclusion that 59% of the tuna Americans consume is not actually "tuna". I would venture that no one reading this comment has ever eaten a piece of tuna that was not actually from a tuna fish (though _maybe_ they lied about which specific variety you were eating).

This organization has a history of running biased studies and then churning out ridiculous charts and headlines to push on local newspapers. They ran with a version of this story in New York City around a year ago. It's nonsense. Eat your tuna and enjoy it.

So the headline is definitely misleading. But there is some shady stuff going on

>> Have you ever eaten something called White Tuna? Neither have I. It's a fairly unpopular sushi fish sold sparsely around the country.

Well. Not really. One or two people might eat this:

http://www.bumblebee.com/products/1/bumble-bee-solid-white-a...

"White tuna" is actually canned albacore. As the article says, "All 16 grocery store samples were labeled correctly." So tuna bought in a can from your local store is Albacore legally and "accurately" named "white tuna." That stuff is ok.

The study goes on to say sushi restaurants are the problem, where escolar is sold as "white tuna."

"The majority of the tuna samples in this study were labeled as “white tuna.” Of the 66 white tuna samples, 62 were mislabeled (94 percent). Eighty-four percent of the white tuna samples were actually escolar (52 of the 62) (Figure 10). The remaining white tuna mislabeling (16 percent) came from the substitution of one type of tuna for another or the use of a non-acceptable market name. A fish product referred to as “white tuna” is only acceptable as a market name when sold in a can."

In restaurants and stores, tuna sold as "tuna" ended up being... tuna.

To be honest, I don't know the prevalence of "white tuna" in sushi restaurants, but a google search of "white tuna sushi san francisco" returns dozens of menus with white tuna on them.

I also don't understand why they chose the misleading "tuna" headline rather than focusing on snapper, of which 100% of sushi restaurant "snapper" was not snapper, as was a large percentage of other restaurants' and grocery stores' supplies.

"More than nine out of every 10 snappers sold in sushi venues were mislabeled (92 percent). Eighty-nine percent of the snappers sampled from grocery stores were found to be mislabeled as were 77 percent from restaurants."

TLDR: Don't eat anything in a sushi place called "white tuna" and your "snapper" is probably not snapper.

Terrible headline for sure. But in sushi restaurants, this mislabeling is actually very common. More often than not, escolar is labeled white tuna. You know it is escolar when it's a pure white and opaque fish with a buttery taste, which although mislabeled, is not at all unpleasant. Rumor has it that of you eat too much, it also gives you diarrhea but fortunately I've never had enough of it to test that theory.

As for real white tuna, there is such a thing and it's called albacore. Aside from being found prevalently in cans, it can also be had at many finer sushi restaurants and it's delicious. White but lightly translucent and often served with a bit of horseradish.

I followed the link about the "olestra fish". You have to eat over 6 ounces. You eat two days worth of meat in one meal, you get what's coming to ya'.

Thanks for this response; I don't have to read the article now. One thing about the "White Tuna" sashimi, almost every sushi place around me has it, North Jersey, NYC included.. I've had it.. but now know its not real tuna as it seems. Just FYI.

Also known as "shiro maguro" (白鮪) which also means white tuna.

So are you saying that the researchers went to Sushi shops and only tested sushi that was labeled as "white tuna" and deliberately avoided samples that were just labeled "tuna"?

The study claims that 95% of tested sushi places were selling mislabeled seafood, but you claim that selling "white tuna" is not common. Can you give us a bit more to go on here?

I really wish tacking CSV files of the raw data onto the end of papers was more of a thing... Charts are such a royal pain in the ass if you are trying to find information that the authors aren't intentionally spoon-feeding you with them.

I wouldn't say it's terribly uncommon, but by far the most common fish served in US sushi are: tuna (one of the red kinds), salmon, and yellowtail (+ imitation crab in rolls). Still popular, but less common, are mackerel (chub), eel, shrimp. Only after that comes things like 'white tuna', snapper, salmon and flying fish roe, sea urchin, Spanish and Japanese mackerel, real crab, and so on.

I don't each much sushi, but in the grocery store "White Tuna" is common. However, it's usually marked "Albacore White Tuna" to signify that it is not escolar but in fact albacore tuna.

For example, from Trader Joe's: http://yeastfreeliving.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/4-8-10...

Several years ago, every sushi restaurant I frequented (in South Florida) stopped mislabeling Escolar as "White Tuna". I thought it was a legal crackdown since I'd already read about the fact that "there's no such thing as White Tuna".

Personally, I don't care what it's called, it's still my favorite (raw). The name Butterfish is new to me, but it makes sense as I always thought it tasted like Mozzarella! (my sister agrees) Thankfully, I've never suffered from eating it either, but then I never have meals with more than a few ounces of it (I typically have at least 3 different fish when I have sushi or sashimi).

Albacore, for comparison, is only white after it's cooked. Before that it's more translucent and slightly pinkish (Escolar is opaque white).

Oddly enough, I've never had cooked Escolar. I wonder how it is. :)

This whole thing reminds me of the Basa/Tra thing (real Basa is so much better than Tra, but they were selling the latter as the former to get a higher price for years).

Perhaps, given the dire state of tuna supplies and consumers who apparently cannot tell the difference without resorting to testing, we should be encouraging mislabeling.

Insisting on a particular rare fish while another more common fish satisfies you just as well is exceptionally silly. Of course it is near impossible to convince consumers of this, but business owners have apparently figured out a solution themselves.

(To keep it safe, the FDA could create lists of fish that may be substituted and labelled as each other.)

This happens with "bacalhau" (norwegian codfish). It's appreciated by the europeans for ages, but overfishing made it prohibitively priced.

Now you have 5 or 6 different fish sold under this name at markets, fished on Alaska and China, but they taste all the same so it makes no difference (only on the price).

The word "bacalhau" now refers more to the kind of preparation (dried fish) than the species itself. It could be the same with tuna ("tuna" being, any red meat fish with the same consistency and similar taste).

Except escolar is a lot more toxic than tuna.

> Perhaps, given the dire state of tuna supplies and consumers who apparently cannot tell the difference without resorting to testing, we should be encouraging mislabeling.

Yes, because fighting ignorance with lies that cater to it is much better than fighting it with information.

You could, and should, do both of course.

If the FDA sanctioned the practice and published lists of approved fish substitutions then only uninformed consumers would be unaware of the possibility that they were being gouged for cheap fish (you can see that gouging as a reward to restaurants that refuse to serve real tuna, and an informal punishment for consumers who are trying to get tuna). These uninformed consumers are presumably un-reached by your media campaign to cut back on tuna consumption.

It also eases the transition from tuna to other fish. I like tuna-salad sandwiches, I eat them a few times a month. I wouldn't know if the tuna in them wasn't real tuna, in fact I hope it isn't. I would have no idea what "escolar salad" is though. Mislabeling allows me to get what I want without unnecessary environmental impact.

Also, mislabeling fish is not unprecedented, but done for worse reasons in the past. See Vietnamese catfish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basa_fish#.22Catfish_war.22_in_....

> You could, and should, do both of course.

No, you should just use the truth, since the lies combat the truth.

If you prevent mislabeling, the rare fish becomes expensive rather than cheap-and-adulterated, the price differences drive lots of the people that think they prefer the rare fish to settle and try the cheaper, less rare, fish, and to the extent that the cheaper fish actually is suitable, people learn and it becomes popular.

If there is a risk of this transition happening too slowly to meet some social good (like, preserving the rare fish), you enact appropriate protections to the rare fish (either quotas, taxes, or outright bans) that restrict the supply or drive up the retail price, which accelerates the process of conversion.

> It also eases the transition from tuna to other fish.

No, it actually delays the conversion of demand by masking the cost and delaying people trying the other fish as itself and learning that it is acceptable.

Real tuna already is expensive, but that isn't helping the fish. By the time it becomes expensive enough to actually kill demand, the species will be in terrible shape.

You can't rely on supply and demand games to keep a species off the brink of extinction, we've learned this too many times the hard way.

> No, it actually delays the conversion of demand by masking the cost and delaying people trying the other fish as itself and learning that it is acceptable.

Informed consumers would be opened up to the new cheaper fish. For example, now that I am aware of it (and specifically aware that it is like tuna), I will make an effort to buy escolar in the future.

> Real tuna already is expensive, but that isn't helping the fish.

It isn't helping the fish because consumer demand for tuna isn't dropping, in part because consumers are insulated from the actual cost of real tuna by mislabelling; if consumer "tuna" was only real tuna (and thus, the supply was restricted to the supply of real tuna, driving the price of consumer "tuna" way up), there would be more consumer experience with tuna substitutes under their own name (rather than mislabelled as tuna), and the demand would shift to the acceptable substitutes (which clearly exist, otherwise they wouldn't be acceptable mislabelled as tuna.)

> For example, now that I am aware of it (and specifically aware that it is like tuna), I will make an effort to buy escolar in the future.

But if suppliers make more money selling escolar as "tuna", it will make it that much harder to by escolar as escolar.

> It isn't helping the fish because consumer demand for tuna isn't dropping, in part because consumers are insulated from the actual cost of real tuna by mislabelling; if consumer "tuna" was only real tuna (and thus, the supply was restricted to the supply of real tuna, driving the price of consumer "tuna" way up), there would be more consumer experience with tuna substitutes under their own name (rather than mislabelled as tuna), and the demand would shift to the acceptable substitutes (which clearly exist, otherwise they wouldn't be acceptable mislabelled as tuna.)

If I buy a can of shredded escolar that calls itself tuna, then I am increasing the profit margin of the fish company which may allow them to sell real tuna to people who demand real tuna at a cheaper price and remain profitable, but in reality real tuna already commands crazy prices and nobody is dropping those prices because of escolar profits.

If you restrict the supply of fish labelled tuna to 'real' tuna, then by the time the cost skyrockets to kill the demand it is already too late. Low supply is exactly what we are trying to avoid. Counting on low supply to safe the species is foolish.

> But if suppliers make more money selling escolar as "tuna", it will make it that much harder to by escolar as escolar

If they couldn't initially sell it as tuna, would they ever sell it at all? Would consumers even be aware of it?

People prefer their comforting lies over the harsh reality of the truth. Your answer while perfectly rational, ignores that people aren't; his answer is more likely to affect change because it requires less people to admit they changed. Everyone just pretends it's still Tuna they're selling and eating.

Trying to force people to accept that we're driving an animal to the brink of extinction is a far harder sell than you seem to realize; they don't accept it and can block attempts to do anything about it. It's a losing strategy that will result in extinct tuna.

Finally, it's not a lie, it's a brand change and Tuna is just a word that is the brand really. Tuna should just mean any fish that can pass for tuna in the context of food. We'll call it Tuna®

"Finally, it's not a lie, it's a brand change and Tuna is just a word that is the brand really. Tuna should just mean any fish that can pass for tuna in the context of food. We'll call it Tuna®"

Agreed. I like the way @noonespecial puts it downthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266772)

"To me tuna is a taste, not a species."

If you ate escolar, you'd really want to know it before you put that fish in your mouth.

Escolar contains a minute amount of a toxin that will irritate your gastro system. You'll be in the bathroom for hours if you eat enough of it, usually just a few pieces.

Some people have a more significant reaction than just mild irritation.

http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/securit/facts-faits/escolar-esc...

http://blog.medellitin.com/2008/12/escolar-world-most-danger...

I've surely eaten it many times before without knowing and have been fine. Regardless, an FDA approved list of fish substitutes would be a good idea and would resolve this concern.

Just because you didn't have a serious reaction, doesn't mean others won't. Mislabeling of food products is not an acceptable solution. Those with food allergies need to know what is going into their food.

Well, I can't really speak to that but I assume the FDA can. If escolar is too dangerous to label as Tuna I am sure they can find other fish that are not. If they okay a fish substitution, I am happy.

You're making a gross assumption if you think the FDA is worried about things like this. Fish mislabeling has been reported as far back as 2005 and nothing has changed.

The FDA is overworked and underfunded. They have their hands full regulating an industry that is constantly out-maneuvering them. Between the drug lobbyists and the supplement industry, we're lucky we have any resources left to dedicate to food safety.

Go do some research into how many actual FDA inspectors are covering the multitude of just meat producers and you'll grasp the scale of the problem.

The FDA has already investigated escolar, so that isn't a problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escolar#Regulation_and_banning

Food labeling is already a part of what the FDA overviews, so they won't have to make a new department or some shit to issue a new rule about labeling a few fish.

I am not proposing that the FDA go test fish and make sure nobody is mislabeling things. Inspector incompetence isn't an issue for this proposal since additional inspections would be unnecessary. I am proposing that the FDA adopt an official policy of turning a blind eye to the mislabeling of fish (while issuing some minimal safety guidance). If they do this right, it would actually reduce the amount of work they are suppose to be doing.

The fact that the FDA is overworked, fatigued, and disinterested is one of the reasons this is a good idea.

FDA overwork and disinterest would be a concern if I wanted to force people to correctly label fish. I want the opposite, I want the status quo to be officially endorsed.

I have eaten it, had trouble, and didn't put two and two together until I read an article explaining the phenomenon of fish mislabeling.

SO...maybe go do an experiment: Go eat a nice big portion of escolar (nee "white tuna") and report back. For science.

Yeah, I'm certainly going to experiment with a small portion first. (I don't really eat large portions of fish anyway.)

1. Put the damn escolar in a round can next to the tuna, priced less than the tuna (raise the price of tuna).

2. Watch as escolar salad sandwiches become popular. (some will even claim it tastes better)

EDIT: PS Print "It helps keep you regular!" on the label.

This idea is particularly interesting to myself considering my vegetarian girlfriend just made me a "Tuna Sandwhich" where the meat was substituted with soaked almonds, which actually tasted quite good and similar to the Tuna I know and love.

Chickpea salad (onions, celery, mayo) is remarkably similar to tuna salad or chicken salad made with the same additions.

I absolutely love chickpea salad (just ate it for dinner, in fact), but it bears essentially no resemblance to either chicken or tuna salad. Both the taste and texture are radically different.

Almonds, chickpeas? I love them both but they're no substitute if your diet requires a decent amount of protein.

Pretty sure almonds are nearly the same amount of protein per ounce as tuna..

Ah, definitely more than I thought. Owing to personal dietary/health requirements, I'm always on the lookout for good sources of low-carb protein, and it's even better if the environmental impact is low.

The macro-nutrient ratios of these three foods (tuna, almonds, and garbanzo beans) are radically different, however. Without breaking down the macro categories into finer detail, here's a rough comparison:

-The tuna is high in protein and contains almost no carbs, and a moderate amount of fat.

-Almonds are nearly as high in protein but have many times the amount of fat (note: that's not necessarily a bad thing)

-Chickpeas have a moderate amount of protein, but are much higher in carbohydrates than the other two.

More than everything except bluefin, according to the internet.

And I am pretty sure that bluefin is never used for tuna salad anyway. It is too expensive.

I ate bluefin salad sandwiches every day for over a year. You are allowed to catch one per year for recreational purposes. You can't sell the meat though. What the hell else are you going to do with 300lbs of frozen tuna in a chest freezer? Bluefin doesn't even taste very good.

If you want a shit ton of bluefin tuna, go to north carolina in the winter. For about $1000, you can hire a boat and catch one. You'll have 200-400lbs of tuna, and and entire belly of o-toro. A year later, you will never want to eat tuna again.

Around Chicago we have problems with Asian carp making their way closer and closer to the great lakes. I've often suggested they be renamed 'river tuna' and our problems will be solved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_carp#As_food

Kentucky Tuna.

A good re-branding could probably go a long way towards helping with that sea lamprey issue the Great Lakes have too...

>we should be encouraging mislabeling.

Not the explosive diarrhea fish. That's cruel, and wrong. Maybe we should just encourage people to eat the fish we have, but be honest about the label.

this is NOT a stupid idea

I always kind of knew that the $5 tuna roll couldn't possibly have come from a $100k fish transported from market in an amored car.

I can't tell the difference. To me tuna is a taste, not a species. For the poor overfished creature that is tuna, maybe it's better this way.

You do realize how big that $100k fish is right?

I believe the fish in question is the bluefin which averages 500lbs or so. Apparently they can sell for much more (even 10x more) than $100k! Even if every pound of the fish became sushi and there was zero markup from the ($100k) fish market price, I figure each piece of sushi should still cost around $12. My feeling is it should probably be more like $36.

I just figured the "tuna" at most sushi joints was one of the lesser species of tuna like albacore or something else entirely.

White Tuna has always been Escolar. There is no such thing as a "white" tuna. Even albacore is not white until cooked. Saying that white tuna is not tuna, is the same as saying Chilean Sea Bass is not a bass. While true, there is no conspiracy.

> Escolar's wax ester content can cause keriorrhea (Greek: flow of wax), gempylotoxism or gempylid fish poisoning.[4] Keriorrhea is similar to diarrhea, only the body will expel yellowish-orange drops of oil instead of liquid bowel movements.

w. t. f. O.O

Actual study, for those interested:

http://oceana.org/sites/default/files/reports/National_Seafo...

I've always wondered - at what level is a person contributing to the Tuna shortage? I rarely eat fish to begin with, have yet to go to a sushi place. But I do have a can of Tuna on Pizza about every month. Is that already too much?

Perhaps it depends if it was farm raised

now, now.. surely this is just splitting hairs.

84% of fish samples labeled "white tuna" were actually escolar, a fish that can cause prolonged, uncontrollable, oily anal leakage.

oh.

Yeah - but it doesn't unless you it quite a good bit of it. And of course it's super yummy. It would of course be better if it was just labeled as escolar (as it is at my local sushi joint)

Uh no, not really. Key word: "can."

I've had Escolar before. Like, went to the supermarket, bought a few pounds of big ol' chunks that were labeled "Escolar," and served said fish as the main entree for dinner. I do not recall anal leakage.

They're fatty. That's it. A cooked Escolar will taste like it was fried in butter, even if you put it in the pan totally dry. Absent food sensitivities (which probably exist), I doubt it causes any leakage beyond that caused by any other source of the same amount of fat, oil, or grease.

> oily anal leakage

> To be frankly and bluntly specific - and I'm sorry for this - consumption of escolar causes explosive, oily, orange diarrhea. People have reported that the discharges are often difficult to control and accidents can happen while passing gas.

Ewww!

Yikes. Good thing I never liked Tuna.

I've never had tuna that looked like escolar, assuming the comparison pictures in a Google image search are accurate:

https://www.google.com/search?q=escolar+vs+tuna&tbm=isch

Particularly this image:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_7tZTQT-lBpA/TJARkX5NXeI/AAAAAAAAAg...

If I received sushi or maki that claimed to be tuna but looked like a ghost I would send it back. Is the use of escolar as tuna a regional thing, or is some escolar a pink/red color?

For an article waxing on about the mislabeling of tuna, it should do a better job not generalizing facts about different species of tuna with all tuna.

> given the dire state of the world's tuna supply

Only some species are overfished. Albacore tuna, for example, are not threatened at all. In fact there's no limit in the US on how many you can catch (non-commercially).

This article is misleading.

My family has been part of the seafood business in North America for almost 30 years, and I definitely have the ability to distinguish between fish species just by looking at flesh.

This article makes no attempt to distinguish between what sushi bars label as 'tuna' and 'white tuna'.

Order 'tuna' and you're almost always going to get tuna. Order 'white tuna' and you're almost always going to get escolar/albacore.

so when i order tuna in a sushi restaurant, what am i actually getting? does this apply to dark red tuna as well as the lighter varieties?

on a similar subject, this is an excellent (and depressing) fresh air episode: http://www.npr.org/2010/07/19/128512740/paul-greenberg-the-f...

So my dad grew up in Bangladesh, a country of rivers with a strong tradition of eating fish. He told me that when he was growing up, there were hundreds of different kinds of fish in the market and even the local river. Today, as a result of run off from intensive agriculture, that variety is almost totally gone.

i knew it! i stopped eating white tuna a while back because i felt it tastes weird, and went to yellowfin instead, but recently i went back to germany and had a tonno pizza and realized just how much different it tastes

As long as the fish is not dangerous (often not the case here apparently), I'm okay with not eating tuna. It's just a real shame they try to fool diners. It's time for the FDA to get involved.

Quite ironic that this was stated by "The Atlantic". I hope at least for Omakase they use the real thing.

wait so , if I go buy tuna sushi roll from my grocery store in boston for 8$, what's the probability it's actually tuna

Probably around 82%. I imagine grocery store sushi has more in common with the rest of grocery store fish than it does with sushi shop sushi. The grocery store probably buys the fish for both from the same chain of suppliers.

I'm less convinced - sushi outside of a restaurant context, from the similarity in presentation style and selection in the DC area at least, seems to be outsourced to daily deliveries from regional suppliers

Hmm, I wasn't aware of that, I thought they usually just had the butcher or somebody throw it together in house. That was just a guess though.

well it's sold in the butcher/fresh fish section of the store, so I'm pretty sure it's prepared on site using whatever is used to supply their normal tuna. at least I hope.

HACKER news != hacker NEWS how did this get to the top people?

I agree this is important but I already saw it my feed and is not hacker related

I've defended all kinds of threads from the "Why is this on HN?" whiners. I'm having a a little trouble with how the choice between yellow waxy buildup in your asscheeks and mercury dementia is an issue. Is sushi that big a Silicon Valley thing?

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