Mislabeling among seafood just tip of the iceberg

Unfortunately, no consumer can be 100 percent sure exactly what goes into the things they eat these days, especially if they’re eating processed, mass-produced items distributed through chain grocery stores or restaurants. Sometimes companies will add a “thickening” agent, but no matter what the source of extraneous material, there’s simply no excusing the presence of substances that have not been properly recorded on food labels.

It’s an alarmingly common phenomenon. A study done this February by the conservation group Oceana discovered that meat being sold as “snapper” had an 87 percent chance of being labeled incorrectly, and that exactly one-third of total seafood products (out of a 1,200+ sample size) weren’t given the right labels at all. The two areas of the country with the highest rate of improperly labeled seafood was Southern California and Pennsylvania, which each saw more than half of its seafood products mislabeled.

Of establishments responsible for these misconceptions, sushi restaurants proved to be the worst offenders, with 74 percent wrongly identifying fish. Compared to this, less than 20 percent of grocery stores got it wrong. However, there are far more grocery stores in the country, so this is not to diminish the seriousness of this problem.

The report expressed the importance of “providing consumers with more information about the seafood they are purchasing, including the exact species, where, when and how it was caught, if it was farmed or previously frozen and if any additives were used during processing.”

Companies making labels for foods of any kind need to be accountable in their presentation. A Primera LX900 color label printer can be an answer to the difficulties of proper item identification.