Seafood species can be mislabelled in misleading ways. This article examines the history and types of mislabelling, and looks at the current state of the law in different locations.
History in the United States Proper species identification of seafood has been important to consumers since ancient times. The Jewish dietary laws, known as kashrut, require the Jews to identify certain types of fish to maintain a kosher diet.Jacobs, L. (1987). The dietary laws. The book of Jewish practice. NJ: Behrman House. Kashrut does not require rabbis to "bless" fish to make it kosher, but rather to identify the features the fish must have to meet kosher requirements (among others) and confirm their existence.
In the 13th century, the King of England passed first law concerning proper labelling requirements, the Assize of Bread and Ale, regulating weight and quality of bread and ale.Ross, Alan S.C., "The Assize of Bread", The Economic History Review, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Pages 332 - 342, 1956. These laws were codified in the colonies, being a part of Britain, in some form. For instance, in 1758, the Georgia Legislature passed the Act for Regulating the Assize of Bread requiring bakers to make an identification mark on their bread to show a source of origin, among other rules.An Act for regulating the assize of bread. Savannah, Georgia, 12 Dec. 1758 (Early American Imprints, 1st Series, no. 41356). Fines were imposed by the statute for lacking this labeling requirement, even if the bread conformed in all other manners.
However, although the United States and each State had adopted the common law of Britain, the regulations on bread did not last long in the colonies.Lammi, Glenn G.; Chang, James (17 December 2004). "Michigan High Court Ruling Offers Positive Guidance on Challenges to Tort Reform Laws". Legal Backgrounder (Washington Legal Foundation) 19 (46). . Because bakers in the colonies were subject to the free-market forces of supply and demand, unlike the bakers' monopolies of the Old World, the colonial bakers began to protest the burdens of these laws and they were eventually repealed once independence was declared. One prominent protest in Massachusetts laid out the economic differences of the colonies and the Old World as a plea to remove these requirements.The petition of John White to The Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Boston, Massachusetts, 1771. (Early American Imprints, 1st Series, no. 42303. While the gist of these protests focused on the pricing restrictions, some were directed toward the labeling requirement as well.The mark on the bread, for instance, could be lost while baking individual loaves next to each other, or in other ways during the cooking and storage process, leading to loss of profit.
After just over a century as a nation, the United States began to recognize, once again, the need to regulate food packaging. In 1898, the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists established a Committee on Food Standards headed by Harvey W. Wiley and thereafter states began incorporating these standards into their food statutes. In the US, the Lacey Act of 1900 provided for criminal and civil penalties for transporting certain species of wildlife in commerce.16 Pub. Land L. Rev. 27 (1995). "Lacey Act: America's Premier Weapon in the Fight against Unlawful Wildlife Trafficking, The"; Anderson, Robert S. While the Lacey Act was directed toward conservation efforts, the law also created a de facto labeling requirement for certain types of products, such as fish.
The first direct statutory regulation of food labeling did not take effect until 1 January 1907. The 59th Congress of the United States passed, and President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law, the nation's first act regulating food and safety, The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (34 U.S. Stats. 768). The Pure Food and Drug Act, which was initially created to ensure products were labeled correctly, also prohibited interstate commerce of misbranded and adulterated foods. Under this statutory authority, one of the most famous cases was a federal misbranding suit against Coca-Cola, claiming that "Coca-Cola" was "misbranded" because the product no longer contained "coca" as an ingredient.United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola, 241 U.S. 265 (1916)
However, the 1906 Act had a number of problems. In 1938, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (52 US Stat. 1040) was signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt replacing or updating most of the 1906 Act. The 1938 Act provides much of the statutory framework that exists today. In 20 chapters, this Act defines food, among other regulated areas, and proper food labeling. For instance, 21 USC § 403, Misbranded Food, states, "A food shall be deemed to be misbranded: (a) (1) If its labeling is false or misleading in any particular… (b) If it is offered for sale under the name of another food." Seafood is, thus, misbranded if the package claims to contain one species of fish but actually contains another species of fish that would mislead.
Although the 1938 Act provides the structural framework for labeling laws in the United States, statutory updates and additions have been made. For instance, in 1966, Fair Packaging and Labeling Act was passed requiring all consumer products in interstate commerce to be honestly and informatively labeled, with FDA enforcing provisions on foods. The Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), or H.R.1627, was passed unanimously in 1996 by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, regulating the use of certain chemicals on commodity foods. All of these laws were enacted for the health, safety and welfare of the consumer.
Federal statutes are usually broad and require federal agencies or federal courts to define the scope, boundaries and definitions of the statutory language.United States administrative law In the case of seafood labeling, the FDA created the Guide to Acceptable Market Names for Seafood Sold in Interstate Commerce. The Guide provides guidance on which types of fish labels would be correct descriptions of certain fish species and which labels would be misleading. The market label for specific species of fish can be found on the FDA's Seafood List website. The FDA explains the history of how this list evolved:
Through the years, the Federal Government has worked to provide consistent and scientifically sound recommendations to industry and consumers about acceptable market names for seafood sold in interstate commerce. This advice was consolidated in 1988 when The Fish List was first published by FDA in cooperation with the National Marine Fisheries Service to provide a source of names that would facilitate consistency and order in the U.S. market place and reduce confusion among consumers. Although The Fish List had significant success in achieving its goal, its usefulness was limited because it did not include invertebrate species. In 1993, The Fish List was revised to include the acceptable market names for domestic and imported invertebrate species sold in interstate commerce, and renamed The Seafood List. The Seafood List provides information to assist manufacturers in properly labeling seafood and to reflect the acceptable market names of new species introduced into the U.S. marketplace.
The list allows multiple different species of certain fish to be marketed under the same market name. For instance, the FDA lists 14 species of fish that can be labeled as "tuna". The list does not allow, however, common substitutes to be listed as the fish they are commonly substituted as. For instance, escolar, the most common substitute for tuna in retail locations,PLOS One: accelerating the publication of peer-reviewed science, 2009, "The Real maccoyii: Identifying Tuna Sushi with DNA Barcodes – Contrasting Characteristic Attributes and Genetic Distances" is not one of the fish legally allowed to be labeled as "tuna". These market names were created both for the safety of the consumer and to prevent economic fraud.
Species identification Because filleted fish are often visually indistinguishable, having lost their skin, fins, and other identifying marks, molecular methods provide the only means of exact identification of fish. Visual taxonomic identification of specific animal species by those who are not expert taxonomists, even if they are identifying whole animals, is inaccurate and difficult. Three molecular targets to test for species identification exist: protein, DNA, and RNA.Molecular phylogenetics However, for forensic testing using DNA is considered to be more accurate (by increasing discriminating power).Sequencing
DNA testing provides a reproducible means of differentiating one species from another. DNA testing was originally developed using microsatellite regions that vary within a species, but do not readily change from generation to generation. DNA and RNA tests were further developed using DNA barcoding to differentiate different species of organisms from each other, while ensuring each organism within a species is properly grouped. Thus, using the barcode method, a lab can identify any species of fish, even without their visual characteristics, as long as the fish has previously been sequenced.
Taxonomic validation In the late 2000s, as DNA sequencing became more accessible, so did the error rate in public DNA databases. As late as 2010, the US General Accounting Office reported, "Public databases seldom use validated fish standards and thus are likely to contain incomplete and/or inaccurate DNA sequences." The authors of "What can biological barcoding do for marine biology?" explain the reason U.S. Government believes "validated fish standards" are important:
Linking DNA sequences to specimens in museum collections is therefore critical for the success of barcoding. The deposition of voucher specimens will ensure that all results entered into GenBank or a similar database can be checked and corrected. Voucher specimens are not a requirement by GenBank today, which is a known problem as errors are frequently discovered in the submissions without any possibility of checking the original material."What can biological barcoding do for marine biology?", C. Schander, E Willassen, Marine Biology Research, 2005; 1: 79-83.
The FDA, agreeing with the need to insure a vouchered and taxonomically validated reference is used, maintains the requirement that only validly authenticated standards be used to make regulatory decisions. In order to help the industry comply with labeling requirements, FDA has worked with the international research effort The Fish Barcode of Life campaign "FISH-BOL" to catalog the world's fish and make the sequences publicly available. The FDA states, "Once completed, the FISH-BOL database will enable a fast, accurate, and cost-effective system for molecular identification of the world's icthyofauna."FDA Guidance Letter, "DNA-based Seafood Identification", 28 October 2011 But, as of today, because FISH-BOL "is not currently searchable against only vouchered species with authoritative taxonomic identifications" this database cannot currently be used for regulatory compliance testing because "FDA will only make regulatory decisions based on identifications using adequately authenticated standards." The BOL project a great research tool, but BOL is not designed to be a regulatory database."Specious Species: Fight against Seafood Fraud Enlists DNA Testing", Clare Leschin-Hoar, Scientific American, 10 November 2011. "Anyone can put sequences in the BOL," says Jonathan Deeds, FDA research biologist and project head. "Most are good, but there are also a small number of guesses." Thus, because Genbank and Fish Barcode of Life databases do not exclusively include only taxonomically validated references, they cannot be relied on for regulatory compliance testing in the US.
Seafood substitution