If you cover the seafood community at all you know the group leading the fight against fish fraud is the Better Seafood Board. Yesterday what some might see as an unlikely ally announced its intention to raise awareness about the need for regulators to step up and confront the issues the BSB has been working on.
Tilapia is a popular, farmed fish that is generally imported to the U.S. It’s also apparently on the hit list of a University of Georgia microbiologist named Michael Doyle. You might have read recently that Doyle claimed "(Feces) is the primary nutrient for growing the tilapia (in China)."
Really? A published professor, who holds numerous food safety patents believes the primary food farmed tilapia is fed is chicken poop?
This week’s GAO report on imported seafood said a number of things and made a number of recommendations that by in large make sense. The report didn’t break much new ground because the Food Safety Modernization Act, released in January, has FDA already working on much of what the report suggested they work on. So, while there was some hand wringing and hyperbolic headlines it wasn’t quite the damning tome some might imagine.
It would appear we’re not the only ones who see Greenpeace’s true colors: a politically motivated organization operating under the guise of charity and environmentalism. Well, not anymore… at least not in New Zealand.
There’s been a bit of breathless reporting on the new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on what the FDA needs to do to improve oversight of imported seafood. In many cases the headlines replete with buzz words like risks, drug-tainted and harmful aren’t quite as impactful when you find the recommendations that the FDA be more risk-based and better leverage its resources have actually already been widely addressed in the Food Safety Modernization Act that came out in January. The GAO report recommends sampling based on targeted risk.
From a past encounter with the New York Times, one that ended with a correction from the Times and a rebuke by the paper’s ombudsman, we know that the Old Grey Lady ain’t what she used to be. But I’m not sure she’s changed for the better.
