Something Fishy

Labeling any item to be something it's not is a classic deceptive practice

Fresh wild salmon from West Coast waters used to have a low profile on the east coast of the United States - it generally migrated eastward in cans.

But a growing concern about the safety of farm-raised fish has given fresh wild salmon cachet. It has become the darling of chefs, who praise its texture and flavor as superior to the fatty, neutral-tasting farmed variety, and many shoppers are willing to pay far more for it than for farmed salmon.

Today, "fresh wild salmon" is abundant, even in the winter when little of it is caught. In fact, it seems a little too abundant to be true.

***

It was.

Today, Honestly Lay Bare finds itself in the library archives reading an April 2005 edition of the New York Times - and the subject, fish fraud.

Tests performed for The New York Times on salmon sold as wild by eight New York City stores, going for as much as $29 a pound, showed that the fish at six of the eight were farm raised. Farmed salmon, available year round, sells for $5 to $12 a pound in the city.

The findings mirrored suspicions of many in the seafood business that wild salmon could not be so available from November to March, the off-season.

Wild and farmed salmon fillets and steaks look similar because farmed fish are fed artificial coloring that makes them pink, but that coloring can be measured in laboratory testing.

With East Coast wild salmon all but extinct and West Coast wild catches restricted by quotas, farmed fish constitute 90 percent of the United States' salmon sales.

Yet in March 2005, when fresh wild salmon should have been scarce, 23 of 25 stores checked by The Times said they had it in stock.

The Times sent random samples of salmon for testing and comparison of levels of natural and artificial pigments, a method that scientists at the Food and Drug Administration have used to identify wild and farmed salmon.

Officials at the stores had a variety of explanations.

Peter Leonard, an owner of Leonard's, said that his records did not go back as far as March 9, but that his sales clerks "must have gotten the salmon from the wrong pile in the back."

William Lettier, the vice president for retail operations at Dean & DeLuca, said four of his vendors could not provide him with their paper trail. He said he now wanted proof of the source of the fish from his vendors and would have his salmon spot-tested.

Jonathan Meyer, a partner in Wild Edibles, said he had narrowed the source of his fish to two Northwest vendors and had suspended business connections with both.

At M. Slavin & Sons in Brooklyn, the store manager, Phil Cohen, said: "Our salmon is from Canada. All wild salmon in Canada is farm raised."

But it can't be both.

Margaret Wittenberg, the vice president for marketing and public affairs at Whole Foods, said its wild salmon was properly labeled and came from the trolling of California's wild king salmon.

Wild salmon become pink by eating sea creatures like krill, which contain a carotenoid called astaxanthin. Farmed salmon are naturally grayish but turn pink when they are fed various sources of astaxanthin, including one that is chemically synthesized and others that originate from yeast or microalgae.

Joseph Catalano, a partner at Eli's and the Vinegar Factory who is responsible for the fish those markets sell, said he was not surprised by the test results. "The bottom line on all this is money," he said.

Faced with fillets of wild and farmed salmon, even renowned chefs who pay top dollar for the choicest seafood, could not visually distinguish one from the other. After the fillets were cooked, however, they could taste the difference.

"The most obvious clue is flavor," said Ms. Fleming of the Alaskan agency, "but by that time it's too late."

***

As much as Honestly Lay Bare loves its salmon (we are not ... yet! ... sufficiently cultured to be able to tell the difference between farm bred and wild salmon), this is a story about much more than poorly labelled fish.

As noted above - the underlying reason that this switching / poor labelling occurs is about money.

And therein lies the link to the origins of a great many deceptions.

Be they deceptions in the consumer experience to make money or deceptions in the construction of a sound internal control environment to save money the end result is the same.

The end user (whether it be the fish consumer or the employee working within an internal control framework) may be deceived for a period of time and indeed may be ignorant throughout the totality of their interaction.

At the moment, however, that the end user finds out that they have been deceived the true price of deception is apparent - you have lost that person's trust.

Good luck in trying to win it back.

Post based on "Stores Say Wild Salmon, but Tests Say Farm Bred" New York Times 10 April 2005 by Marian Burros