Where Is Your Fish From?

One hundred years ago, this question was easier to answer because very often fish came from nearby. Dried and smoked fish was extensively traded, but not in a way that rivaled today's seafood mobility. The U.S. now imports 83 percent of its seafood. With the recent scare over contaminants in food imports from China, including the health of our fish and fisheries products, the media has been probing into our food's origin (see, for instance, this editorial in the New York Times).

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) requires the country of origin of all food products to be identified with the exception that "when a food undergoes processing in a second country which changes its nature, the country in which the processing is performed shall be considered to be the country of origin".

One hundred years ago, salmon labels looked like this: salmon was canned where it was caught. Today, most canneries on the west coast of North America have closed. Cans of wild Alaska salmon now read "Product of Thailand". Seem strange? It is. On its website, the seafood producer Ocean Beauty even answers questions like, Why does my Pillar Rock Pouch Salmon say "Product of Thailand" on the package?

What good is a country of origin label if it's not where the product originated but where it was processed? If fact, some ask what good is a country-of-origin label at all? This group of skeptics is dominated by agribusiness (e.g., Wal-Mart Stores, Tyson Foods, the American Meat Institute), which recently participated in the political process with a US$29.2 million lobbying campaign against country-of-origin legislation.

But today, a few New York Times readers also expressed their doubts over a country-of-origin label in a group of letters the Times called Does Your Dinner Have Jet Lag? For instance,

To the Editor:
Labeling for country of origin is such a trivial matter compared with knowing what that cow and that fish were fed, how they were raised, what drugs were used and how they were killed. This is what I need to know about my food. What do I do with country-of-origin labels? Make a political statement against Communism?
Joshua Tauberer
Philadelphia, July 4, 2007

Mr. Tauberer is right that we should probably be more concerned with content than origin. What the heck is in our fish? In 2006, the FDA had only enough resources to check 1 percent of the 8.9 million imported food shipments. The Agency tested only 0.59 percent of seafood imports in 2006--two-thirds the amount of imported seafood tested in 2003.

But Mr. Tauberer is not exactly right to assume that where food is produced does not affect content. A 2004 study published in Science examined more than 700 salmon samples from around the world fround that salmon farmed in European countries have significantly higher levels of contamination than those raised in North and South America. And that's not the only reason to support legislation for better seafood labels. Join Shifting Baselines in a continued pursuit of why and how our seafood moves and why citizens (and consumers) should care.