Be careful what you eat - Sushi

From CNN comes this story of two teenagers who did a little bit of research on their favorite subject - Sushi:

DNA testing uncovers suspect sushi
Two teenage girls used DNA bar coding to determine that some sushi on New York dinner plates was mislabeled with cheaper fish being passed off as a more expensive species.

Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss were not science majors or even college students when they decided to take 60 samples of seafood and use a genetic fingerprinting technique to see whether the fish were labeled correctly.

The graduates of Manhattan's Trinity School in New York were inspired by Kate Stoeckle's father, Mark, a scientist and proponent of the use of DNA bar coding, a technique that greatly simplifies the process of identifying a species.

"Growing up, bar coding was dinner conversation, so I was familiar with it," Stoeckle said. "And then one night, while out to dinner, I asked, could we barcode sushi? Louisa and I love sushi, and we thought, why not apply the bar coding technology to see what food we're eating?"

After collecting samples from four restaurants and 10 grocery stores, spending about $300, the teens sent them to the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, where the Barcode of Life project began and where a graduate student had agreed to conduct the genetic analysis.

And the results?

The results showed that 25 percent of the girls' samples were mislabeled: half of the restaurant samples and six out of 10 grocery store samples.

In every case, less desirable or cheaper fish was substituted for its more expensive counterpart, Stoeckle said. She and her father would not divulge the names of vendors, citing a fear of lawsuits.

"It's not the fishermen, and it might not even be the restaurants," she said. "Most likely, the mislabeling is occurring somewhere at the distribution level."

For example, fish sold as white tuna turned out to be cheaper Mozambique tilapia, flying roe fish was replaced with smelt, and red snapper was mislabeled as Atlantic cod and Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

This does not surprise me at all. For our store, we are very careful about our vendors and there are some that I will not deal with under any circumstances. The previous owner always went for the cheap price. For some funny reason, every month that we have owned the store has seen an increase in sales -- August was our best month ever. The customer is very perceptive when it comes to the quality of the merchandise...