Number of the Day

48%: The percentage of fish collected from "134 restaurants, grocery stores, and seafood markets from Leominster to Provincetown" in Massachusetts that were found by the Boston Globe being "sold with the wrong species name."

The sliver of raw fish sold as white tuna at Skipjack's in Foxborough was actually escolar, an oily, cheaper species banned in Japan because it can make people sick. The Alaskan butterfish at celebrity chef Ming Tsai's Blue Ginger in Wellesley was really sablefish, traditionally a staple at Jewish delicatessens, not upscale dining establishments.

At Chau Chow Seafood Restaurant in Dorchester, the $23 flounder fillet turned out to be a Vietnamese catfish known as swai - nutritionally inferior and often priced under $4 a pound.

Those were among the findings of a five-month Globe investigation into the mislabeling of fish. It showed that Massachusetts consumers routinely and unwittingly overpay for less desirable, sometimes undesirable, species - or buy seafood that is simply not what it is advertised to be. In many cases, the fish was caught thousands of miles away and frozen, not hauled in by local fishermen, as the menu claimed. It may be perfectly palatable - just not what the customer ordered. But sometimes mislabeled seafood can cause allergic reactions, violate dietary restrictions, or contain chemicals banned in the United States.

...The results underscore the dramatic lack of oversight in the seafood business compared with other food industries such as meat and poultry. Nationally, mislabeled fish is estimated to cost diners and the industry up to hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to the National Fisheries Institute, a trade group.

It happens for a range of reasons, from outright fraud to a chef's ignorance to the sometimes real difficulty of discerning one fillet from another. But industry specialists say money is commonly the motivator: It's a way to increase profits - a cheaper fish sold as something more pricey - on the assumption that customers will not detect the difference.

From Part One of a two-part series. Part Two is here.

[Via Susie.]