In the early-morning hours, workers at a Goldwell Trading Corp. warehouse in Boston load boxes of frozen escolar into vans for delivery to area sushi restaurants.
By the time the fish appears on diners’ plates, it has undergone a Cinderella-like transformation: the escolar, which can cause digestion problems, is presented as white tuna or albacore – more palatable and pricier fish.
Suppliers such as Goldwell use the names interchangeably, contributing to a little-known but pervasive problem in the international seafood industry: lower-quality and less expensive fish mislabeled as desirable species. Some distributors do this unknowingly, while others intend to deceive. Lax government oversight, industry indifference, and consumer ignorance allow mislabeling to flourish.
Fish misidentification is especially common at sushi restaurants, partly because they use various names for the same fish. The confusion can be compounded by packaging labels written in other languages that are incorrectly translated into English.
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