The Seafood Label Problem Most Shoppers Never Notice

0:00When you buy seafood at the grocery store, the label might say something simple. Salmon, tuna, cod. But those labels often hide more information than they reveal. In many cases, consumers have almost no idea what species they are actually eating or where it came from. And that lack of transparency has become a major issue in global seafood markets. This is the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, your weekday ocean news update. If you care about staying informed on the ocean every weekday, hit that follow button right now so you don't miss tomorrow's story. So the key question today is, what information do seafood labels actually provide? And what information is missing? That's really the question here. So seafood labeling rules very widely in the world. In major markets, labels include only a few pieces of basic information. May have like a common market name, so what you'd know, cod, salmon, tuna, that kind of stuff. The country of origin, and whether the seafood was farmed or wild caught. But in many cases, the labels don't include

1:00the exact scientific species name, which is really, really important. We'll talk about that in a second. The catch location or the fishing area, the fishing method use and the vessel or the fleet that it was caught in. So even just like the registration flag where this vessel was registered. Without this information, it becomes difficult for consumers to understand what they are actually buying. And the issue becomes even more complicated because many market names represent multiple different species. For example, the label snapper can represent more than 60 different species worldwide, 60. The label tuna can refer to several species with very different population statuses. The term rockfish includes dozens of species of the genus sebatis. Some of these species are abundant. Others are heavily overfished or under strict management. But when they're grouped under one simple in the market name, consumers cannot easily tell the difference. It's really difficult. Knowing the scientific species name, you can actually get what the common names are. So you'll have one species name, which is like a Latin name.

2:02And once you have that Latin name, it'll list all the different. Like if I search up Latin names and chat GPT or even on Google or Gemini, whatever that might be, I don't know what we're searching in these days. If I search a scientific name, you'll get all the common names that they're common referred to and you'll see that there are multiple common names. And that just could mean the different parts of the world, different countries are found. They might have like a Spanish name, they might have an English name. Even within an English name, they'll be called different things or known for different things. So just having a common name doesn't necessarily mean that you're eating the species you think you're eating. But having that scientific name really brings it to that area. Also, the vessel or fleet that caught the fish, making sure that you know what country that vessel or fleet were registered to is really important because that will tell you whether that country is known for good fisheries practices or not so good fisheries practices. Some countries are known for not regulating or not managing the illegal, unregulated and unreported fisheries, so IUU fishing, which is a big problem when we look at overfishing. And so some countries have a really bad reputation for that. Others have a really good reputation.

3:04So a lot of the vessels will register under the countries that do not have a good reputation for it because it's easier to get away with IUU fishing. So that's how it really works. So what is the science saying? Researchers studying seafood supply chains have repeatedly found that the lack of species level labeling creates major transparency gaps. A global analysis of seafood labeling and traceability found that the seafood products often pass through multiple intermediates. So including processors, distributors, and wholesalers before reaching consumers. In some cases, after the fishers catch the fish, they give it to somebody, like give it to a company and they actually don't know where their product is sold. That's been documented a number of times, especially there was one place in North Carolina where it was documented where the fishers didn't know where it went. It got handed off a number of different times and it would end up in New York, or end up in Seattle, or end up anywhere. But they had no idea who was buying their fisheries. That's why a lot of fishers that are local have gone to local catch shares where people pay into a program and they will get certain fish out of that. They'll get certain amount of fish out of that depending on how much they pay.

4:05So like if they have a catch share and you pay like $200, you may get $200 worth of fish. The fisher knows who it's going to locally which is really great for the fisher. And the consumer knows who caught it. They know their families, they know everything and it's kind of nice to have that relationship. It kind of brings it back home. It kind of brings pride back into the fishers. I'm not a fisher, but I know fishermen and fishing communities have a lot of pride in their work and I'm sure they would want to see it go to people that they know and that they can know will enjoy their fish. So at each step of the supply chain, information about species identity or catch origin can be lost or simplified into these broad categories. So another study examined seafood labeling in North America and found that market names frequently grouped multiple species together making it difficult for buyers to know exactly where they were purchasing. This is not necessarily illegal. In many cases, it is simply how seafood regulations were designated decades ago. But the result is a marketplace where species level transparency is often missing.

5:05A solution to that is to update these regulations, update the marketplace, making sure that transparency is for thinking in the policy, in the regulations, in the law. So why does this matter? Why do we care from a consumer's point of view, from my point of view, like why am I telling you why labeling is important and the lack of information labeling is not a good thing? When seafood is sold under broad market names instead of specific species, several problems emerge. First, it becomes harder to detect seafood fraud. If you have the transparency and know the species, you know where it's gone, throughout the entire supply chain, it's really hard to sell fraudulent seafood or even pass on fraudulent seafood. Second, fisheries managers have more difficulty tracking, which species are actually being sold and consumed. And third, consumers who want to make sustainable seafood choices often do not have the information they need. A great example is anytime I go to the supermarket and I ask the person behind the counter and usually it's like, you know, something like a teenager or someone who's just trying to get their job, trying to get their pay, whether it's minimum wage as a student or a student wage

6:06or somebody else has been there forever. If they don't know much about the fish, they don't know where it came from, how it was caught, where it was caught, it makes the process really difficult. And to be honest, it shouldn't be up to the person behind the counter. It should be up to the labels that are on the actual packaging. So for example, two fish labeled as tuna may come from completely different fisheries and completely different geographies with very different environmental impacts. But the label does not always reveal the difference. This lack of transparency creates blind spots across the entire seafood supply chain. Tomorrow, we're gonna look at how scientists discovered the seafood labels are sometimes not just vague. They're just sometimes wrong. DNA testing has revealed widespread seafood mislabeling in markets around the world. We're gonna really dive deep into fraud. And the results, it may surprise you. But if you like this information and you wanna know more, please hit that follow button so you don't miss the next episode. And if you know someone who may benefit from this, whether it's another marine biologist or you know someone who's really involved in the ocean or someone who loves seafood

7:08and they wanna have more sustainable choices or better pick the choices, send this to them right now. That's how we get this community larger. That's how we get more people talking about the ocean because this is the beginning of a conversation. I would love for you to continue it. You can give me feedback or you can have questions, comments or anything like that. If you go to speakupforblue.com, forward slash feedback. That's speakupforblue.com, forward slash feedback. The link is in the show notes. If you wanna just click on that. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on this. I would love to hear your experiences when you buy seafood and do you find it confusing? Do you look for labels, all that kind of stuff. Love to hear your thought. But until next time, I wanna thank you for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I am your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.