Consumers, be wary! A DNA-based survey from Oceana revealed that shrimps bought at supermarkets have misleading labels-you could be buying common shrimp when you bought premium shrimp.
Oceana's probing included how shrimp were labelled on menus, seafood counters and packages in grocery stores. The group performed genetic testing of samples from restaurants and grocery stores in Washington, D.C., New York City, Oregon, Portland, and different stores in the Gulf of Mexico.
The advocacy group discovered that 30 percent of 143 shrimp products purchased from 111 outlets either have misleading lebels meaning to say, cheap farm-raised shrimp is being sold as expensive, prized, wild-caught Gulf shrimp, mislabelled (swapping one species for another), or mixed/mystery (mixed species in bagged shrimp with no indication where they came from).
The group also found out that the most desirable shrimp of highest value, Ruby Red which is a rare species found only in three places on Earth (the two are located along the Gulf Coast off Florida and Alabama)-sold in the stores are fraud, and a third of the shrimp sold were actually farm-raised.
Furthermore, the seafood deception was worse in New York, where 43 percent of the shrimp were mislabelled, with over two-thirds of grocery store shrimp have a fake claim, and or than half labelled farmed shrimp as wild shrimp.
The reason there is growing concern against farm-raised shrimp is because of hazardous working conditions, damage to ecosystems and the use of antibiotics and hormones used in farm-raised shrimps.
"Personally I have big problems with imported shrimp, the chemical residues and they are farmed under horrid conditions," Steven Kronenerg, a California lawyer who wokrs on food fraud cases.
If you buy imported shrimp, there are any number of public studies that show that the shrimp might well come from a place different from what's listed on the package. There are a lot of problems with imported shrimp," Kronenerg added.
The advocacy group is calling for regulators to strictly impose proper labelling among these vendors.
