Making Sense of the Lingering Sushi “Substitute” Problem in Austin
I’ve been getting quite a few emails from our readers lately after the recently released results of a two-year national study by non-profit Oceana. Turned out that according to the study, many restaurants and stores across the US were apparently substituting a cheaper fish for the fish they told the customers they were purchasing. Worse still the problem escalated in Sushi Bars and restaurants. And worst of all, every Austin sushi restaurant tested in the study was supposedly guilty of misrepresenting at least one type of fish. (Not all Austin restaurants were tested, and the study did not name the ones that were.)
Typical substitutions included escolar (which can cause digestive problems for some) for white tuna and tilapia for the more expensive red snapper. There were even instances where American catfish were shipped to China only to be repurchased and shipped back to the states as sushi-grade fish. Oceana’s study used DNA testing to specifically identify which fish were being mislabeled. They mentioned no restaurants by name (certainly wish they had) but the implications are scary as hell. There were also massive substitutions of fish viewed as unsustainable for fish that were less endangered.
Most of our expert local sushi chefs, in my opinion, could rarely be fooled by a vendor trying to suggest that one fish is indeed another. Again, I know many of these guys and I refuse to believe they would deliberately mislead a customer about what fish they are getting. And it would be virtually impossible to fake maguro or o toro. So, how did this study find such a wildly disproportionate mislabeling of sushi in Austin? The frustrating answer is that I’m really not sure where the fault lies. Oceana can be a bit radical in their zeal to save the the oceans and the dish that swim in them. The study needed quite a bit more quantification in my opinion. And there are over 1800 species of fish consumed in this country shipped in and labeled by hundreds of vendors. A mistake could be made anywhere along the line. Still the mere suggestion of impropriety is bad enough but for a city like ours that’s used to being #1 on most lists for all the RIGHT reasons.
If any of this concerns you, my suggestion would be to stick to restaurants and chefs you know and trust here in Austin. And I’ll still hit the fish stalls at Central Market and Quality Seafood. I’m not going to stop eating sushi or sashimi, it’s just too damned tasty. But I won’t be afraid to ask questions, even tough questions if need be, if I have any doubts. My health and yours is simply worth too much. You can log on to oceana.org if you want to take a look at what Oceana had to say about seafood fraud.
