Towse: views from the hill

August 22, 2008

Fish Tale Has DNA Hook – Students Find Bad Labels

Filed under: food,news,technology — Towse @ 9:25 pm

Fish Tale Has DNA Hook – Students Find Bad Labels – NYTimes.com

Two teenagers, recently graduated from high school, decided to check whether the fish in restaurants and at the fishmongers is really what it’s labeled as.

Upshot? They found 25% of the fish with DNA they could identify had been mislabeled.

(The mislabeling usually meant the fish was identified by the seller as a more expensive fish than it really was. Shock.)

The teenagers shipped the fish off to someone at FISHBOL who did the DNA analysis using a newish technique that is simpler and cheaper than a full-bore analysis.

Bad enough that your wild-caught salmon might not be wild-caught. It might not even be salmon!

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