More Than One-Third of U.S. Shrimp May be Mislabeled, Study Says

Yesterday, an article was released on National Geographic’s webpage, titled “More Than one-Third of U.S. Shrimp May be Mislabeled, Study Says” revealing that an FDA study recently found that most shrimp advertised as farmed is usually substituted for wild shrimp. Some of you might wonder why this is significant. First, its false advertising, but more importantly, it has environmental implications. Here’s what the article has to say about it:

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program considers U.S.-caught wild shrimp to be a “Best Choice” or “Good Alternative” from an environmental point of view, thanks to rigorous fisheries laws that reduce unintended bycatch of turtles, marine mammals, and other threatened organisms. The situation is different for farmed shrimp, however. Most foreign farmed shrimp is on Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “Avoid” list because of concerns about habitat destruction, overfishing of other organisms to serve as feed, waste pollution, spread of diseases, and overuse of chemical treatments.

A startling idea that was also mentioned in this article is provided below.

According to Oceana’s Warner, a problem with foreign shrimp is that Asian shrimp farms might be using toxic chemicals that are banned in the U.S. And consumers can’t always rely on the mandatory country-of-origin label system, she says, because the rules state that only the last country where seafood was processed must be listed.