Sen. Olympia Snowe: “Frankly, this is unacceptable”
Yes, Senator, it is. Has been for a long time.
What she and I are both referring to is the practice of substituting one (usually lesser priced) fish for the one listed on the menu. Often this takes the form of “grouper” becoming catfish and “snapper” becoming tilapia. Bland for tasty. Frozen for fresh. Farm raised for wild caught. Imported for domestic. Any and all of the above.
A person goes into a “Fresh Seafood Restaurant” while on vacation and spends $12 for a “grouper sandwich” lunch, then a month later is back home in their local grocery store and sees grouper fillet on sale for $15/lb. or more. What do they say? “Oh, we had that on vacation and it was nothing special, it isn’t worth that much….get that farm raised tilapia”?
“Frankly, this is unacceptable.”
Why it has been allowed to go on for so long is a mystery but perhaps it will finally be put to an end. We can only hope. Senator Olympia Snowe, perhaps spurred on by a study done last year by the Scripps Television Station Group, is currently drafting legislation to plug a hole in government oversight that routinely allows such “fish fraud”.
The Scripps study returned some disturbing numbers. Scripps used DNA testing to find that 23 out of 38 meals served at restaurants in the four U.S. cities were incorrectly marketed as fancier fare. One of the cities in their study was Tampa, one of Florida’s largest cities and a city right across the bay from where most domestic wild caught grouper are landed.
Brendan Farrington, of AP, reported in January of 2008 that “The Florida Department of Business & Professional Regulation, which regulates restaurants, found 139 cases of something other than grouper being sold as the fish between January 2006 through the end of last October”. Has anything been done about that? Well, no, not really.
Hell, fake grouper even turned up on the tables at the Florida State Capitol Cafeteria. Talk about unacceptable.
Perhaps with the help of a U.S.Senator from Maine, something will finally be done about this.
“Frankly, this is unacceptable.”
Thanks, Madam Senator.
