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Teen Sleuths Find Something Fishy in New York Sushi

Store, restaurant labels tell a real whopper of a fish story

By Truman Lewis
ConsumerAffairs.com

August 22, 2008
Federal agencies are always complaining they don't have enough manpower to keep tabs on the U.S. food supply. Maybe they should recruit some high school kids.

Two New York City high school students used the very latest testing technologies to examine 60 samples of seafood from local restaurants. Using DNA testing, they found that fully 23 percent of their catch was mislabeled.

A piece of sushi that was sold as expensive white tuna was actually Mozambique tilapia, a cheap farm-raised fish, The New York Times reported. Roe that was sold as being from flying fish was actually from the much more common smelt.

Of nine pieces of supposed red snapper, seven turned out to be something else.

Although the teens, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, used a sophisticated test involving what's called DNA bar coding, they didn't have to spend long hours in the lab. Instead, they hung out in sushi bars, saving small samples of each day's catch.

They sent the samples to Canada's University of Guelph, where a grad student used the school's Barcode of Life Database to identify them.

The results? Two of four restaurants and six of ten grocery stores had sold the girls mislabeled fish.

The study is being reported in Pacific Fishing magazine, a trade publication for commercial fishermen.

Stoeckle and Strauss were students at New York's Trinity School when they started the project. They have since graduated. There's no word on their career plans.

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