Restaurants plan DNA-certified premium seafood

[longnecker]

Restaurants plan DNA-certified premium seafood
'Barcoding as a mark of quality'

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Restaurants around the world will soon use new DNA technology to assure patrons they are being served the genuine fish fillet or caviar they ordered, rather than inferior substitutes, an expert in genetic identification says.
In October, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration officially approved so-called DNA barcoding — a standardized fingerprint that can identify a species like a supermarket scanner reads a barcode — to prevent the mislabeling of both locally produced and imported seafood in the United States. Other national regulators around the world are also considering adopting DNA barcoding as a fast, reliable and cost-effective tool for identifying organic matter.
David Schindel, a Smithsonian Institution paleontologist and executive secretary of the Washington-based Consortium for the Barcode of Life, said he has started discussions with the restaurant industry and seafood suppliers about utilizing the technology as a means of certifying the authenticity of delicacies.
"When they sell something that's really expensive, they want the consumer to believe that they're getting what they're paying for," Schindel told The Associated Press.
"We're going to start seeing a self-regulating movement by the high-end trade embracing barcoding as a mark of quality," he said.
While it would never be economically viable to DNA test every fish, it would be possible to test a sample of several fish from a trawler load, he said. read more
http://www.wtnh.com/dpps/news/strang...11-jgr_3999738

[Josef]

I'll be happy as long as there's no human DNA in my food.

[hockey]

Just saw this in Consumer Reports.....

~ Only four of the 14 types of fish we bought—Chilean sea bass, coho salmon, and bluefin and ahi tuna—were always identified correctly.
~ Eighteen percent of our samples didn't match the names on placards, labels, or menus. ~ Fish were incorrectly passed off as catfish, grey sole, grouper, halibut, king salmon, lemon sole, red snapper, sockeye salmon, and yellowfin tuna.
~ Four percent were incompletely labeled or misidentified by employees.
~ All 10 of the "lemon soles" and 12 of the 22 "red snappers" we bought weren't the claimed species.
~ One sample, labeled as grouper, was actually tilefish, which averages three times as much mercury as grouper. The Food and Drug Administration advises women of childbearing age and children to avoid tilefish entirely.
~ Out of curiosity, we sent the lab something labeled "colossal sea scallop" because it looked suspiciously huge. The results showed that it was a scallop, but not the labeled species.

Seafood mislabeled, misidentified species of fish, CR investigates

This pissed me off but somehow, I'm not surprised. Just another example of "don't trust anyone, anywhere".

[Curly]

I feel like a T-bone tonight.