Am I the victim of an international sushi scam? (Part 2)

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1:35This is Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. This is part two of our prestigious investigative series, Am I the Victim of an International Sushi Scam?

1:46In part one, I had a literally gut-wrenching question. A New York City sushi restaurant had been making me sick almost every time I ate there. For reasons having to do with my own broken psychology, I kept ordering anyway. I've gotten some emails and comments about how many times I did this. I don't want to say on air how many times I did this, but I will tell you it's a number greater than 20 and less than 91. That's not the point. The point is, eventually I got curious about what might be happening, and I learned that there's something called fish fraud, or fish substitution, in which fish sellers swap one fish for another without telling the customer.

2:21I began to suspect that the spicy tuna rolls I've been ordering contained not tuna, but a fish called Escalar, a fish that can provoke intense GI distress, so much so that it's been nicknamed the exlax fish. The exlax fish. Laxative of the sea. That was my suspicion. But Dr. Peter Marco, an esteemed academic I'd been talking to, had offered to DNA test the actual fish in the role. We mailed a piece of sushi to his lab in Hawaii, and sometime later, Dr. Marco got in touch. Check, check, check, check. Okay, we're recording. Okay. So first of all, thank you for doing free lab work for Sir Jim Jim.

3:02I know, I'm not happy to do it. It's kind of fun to solve a little mystery. Dr. Peter Marco, who, I have to say, is pretty dashing. He's got a cool surfer vibe. He sports a Hawaiian shirt sometimes. We were talking from what looked to be his home office. He had a bunch of handwritten notes from his work that week. Do you want to actually see sort of what I did? It might be kind of nice to actually... Yes, I'm so curious. Because it's more than just a reveal out of a black box, I think. Yeah, please. Okay, so I'm a co-host here, so I think I can show you. All right, so what we... Peter broke down the process for DNA testing suspicious sushi.

3:40He did this using what's called a Chiagen DNEZ blood and tissue kit. Once he'd extracted some DNA, the next thing he did was run the sample through a PCR, not so different from the kind of PCR you might use to test for COVID. The goal is to make a bunch of copies of a section of the genetic material that'll help figure out what organism it belongs to. At this point, if everything is gone according to plan, you're ready for the final step. Sequencing the DNA. Peter sent the PCR product off to another lab on campus that ran it through a fancy machine. There, the machine read the DNA region he'd copied from, one base pair at a time, and gave him something like a genetic signature from the sample.

4:21And once he had that genetic signature, he was able to figure out what fish it really belonged to. I can then identify it. All right, so now what you're looking at is the portal for a tool called BLAST, which is a portal that allows us to access databases at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, or NCBI, commonly referred to as GenBank. And I can send a sequence that I paste into this box, which is your sequence or the sequence from your sample, and blast it and wait a few seconds, maybe a minute, and this will come back and tell us what matches that sequence in this massive database.

5:03So this is like the fingerprint database of DNA. Yeah, it's not what we would actually call a fingerprint in the field, But every time somebody publishes a paper involving DNA sequences, they submit the sequences to this site. And so it's this ginormous repository of sequences that originate from all kinds of studies. Anything that involves DNA sequencing, it's mandatory for most scientific journals to submit those sequences to this database so anybody can take your data and have a look at it for themselves. Wait, so is this going to give us our answer? It'll tell us what the very best match is in this database and how well it matches.

5:43Oh, okay, yeah. So this is the moment of truth. Yeah, we need a really long drum roll.

5:50Peter hits the button. The website very slowly churns. And then we get a result. Uh-oh, it doesn't look good if I'm reading the Latin on this right. So can you read that? Thunis. Albuqueras. And they're all Thunis albacaris, which I'm assuming is a fancy Latin for albacore tuna.

6:12No, albacaris, oddly, is yellowfin tuna. And it matches, that 100 % means that our sequence matches this sequence in GenBank 100%. And it gives us a list of the top 100 sequences that match ours from GenBank. But it's a 100 % match with yellowfin. Right, yeah. So there's all these matches. If we scroll down, there's one that's 99%, but they're all tuna.

6:46All tuna. It wasn't Escalar. Sure, multiple studies suggest there's some sort of fish fraud epidemic plaguing American cities, but I was not a victim of it. Not this time. Peter said he'd actually suspected as much when he'd opened the envelope we'd mailed and pulled the fish out. He saw that the fish had stained the alcohol it was preserved in a reddish color, which for him was a clue. Well, okay, so you guys kind of threw me for a loop there with that because he didn't tell me about the color of the fish. So Escolar is going to be really white and it's called white tuna because the attempt is to pass it off as albacore tuna, which is quite possibly my favorite type of tuna for sushi.

7:28If it's got that characteristic red color, it's almost certainly yellowfin or bluefin and probably not escolar. I don't know about fish being dyed other than aquaculture fish being fed dyes to make their flesh look more appealing like that's common with farm-raised salmon. Oh, interesting. So what was going on here? Why would yellowfin tuna, a fish I've eaten my whole life, be making me sick when I consumed it from this one New York City sushi restaurant? Peter continued to play detective. If you go to a different sushi bar or restaurant and you order tuna, what happens? Totally fine. Wow. That's amazing that they consistently are serving something that's making you sick.

8:16That's pretty remarkable. I know, because in my mind, I'm like, if it were unsafe or unhygienic kitchen practices, then some of the time it would happen. You know what I mean? It wouldn't happen so often. Yeah, I think you need a food safety expert, maybe. I don't want to get it. Maybe it's just a problem with me. Maybe I'm the problem. At one restaurant? I mean, there's nothing unusual about this fish. It's yellowfin tuna. I think you need to get more people to go there and eat it and see what happens. It's funny. It's sort of like when you're with your partner and they're like, oh, this is disgusting.

8:48You got to try it. It's going to be hard for me to tell my friends, you have to go to this restaurant because it makes me sick and I don't know why. Yeah, I think you need a bigger sample size of people to accuse them, which would allow you to rule out something about you and that particular type of fish. I feel like I'm just back in the mystery. Yeah, the mystery continues.

9:13After a short break, if anyone is eating while listening to this, I salute you. But this would be your last warning to stop. Because we are going to go deeper into our next suspect. Bacteria. That's after some ads.

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11:48Welcome back to the show.

11:54My life had entered a bleak chapter. I wanted an answer to this mystery, and I saw no avenue towards one. The fish wasn't Escalar, but it was making me sick. I didn't know if it would make other people sick, which now seemed important to determine, but also ethically difficult to test. We briefly talked about having some kind of search engine holiday party where we'd serve guests risky sushi rolls and airline coffee. This idea was quickly vetoed. I ordered the sushi a few times just to make sure it was still making me sick. It was. Garrett Graham, who produced this story, had ordered the sushi.

12:30I did not tell him to, but he did, and he ate it, and he said it made him feel sick too. Not as sick as me, but a, quote, definite tightness in the stomach. So I returned to the internet. Foodborne illness, I learned, afflicts one out of six Americans a year, and contaminated food is a serious enough issue nationally that both the FDA and the CDC maintain public websites tracking outbreaks in contaminated food. These are plain government websites which describe in clinical hysteria-free language the routine horrors that sneak into American foodstuffs. Hanging out on these databases, you get a different view of our country.

13:12It turns out some batches of super-premium mint chocolate chip ice cream may contain listeria. Cans of one variety of smokeless tobacco may contain foreign metal objects. Salmonella abounds in some brands of dry dog and cat food. Mistakes have been made. You will not learn about your local sushi restaurant here, though. The FDA and CDC are concerned with food that has entered at a higher point in the supply chain, brands which circulate down to grocery stores and food establishments. They don't tell you about solitary restaurants. I did get connected to a food safety expert named Matt Ranieri.

13:52He offered a few clues. He said that sometimes restaurants can develop what's called a biofilm, which is exactly as gross as it sounds. It's a kind of house strain of bacteria, a little colony of microorganisms that make their home on a specific kitchen surface. Once biofilms develop, they can be very resistant to routine disinfection. Did my sushi restaurant have a biofilm?

14:19I wanted to know if someone could test the sushi for specific bacteria, So we started contacting labs all over the country to find one that would test our tuna rolls. The problem, we learned, is that the labs that do this kind of work are all designed to test large batches of food for big commercial clients. They wouldn't take on a random one-off, a piddling piece of sushi from a piddling podcaster. My lucky break, when I found it, was because my diet began to shift. Not my food diet, my podcast diet. Bacteria. Bacteria.

14:54You know, when people ask what podcasts I listen to, I tell them the usual stuff. Hard Fork, Ezra Klein. It's just too complicated to explain that these days I've mostly been listening to Risky or Not, the podcast hosted by Dr. Don and his co-host Professor Ben, two food safety experts. In this podcast, we promise to do our best not to waffle, dither, dissemble, or equivocate, and to give you straight-up answers about whether something is risky or not. Each episode, the two discuss the health risks associated with various questionable food-eating scenarios. Highlight episodes include adults eating at picnic tables with a little bit of dried bird poop, eating focaccia made on a counter where eight cats have walked.

15:38A chicken taco found at the bottom of a backpack on a hot summer day that had been there for at least a day and a half. The verdict on that one, by the way, risky. The man who goes by Dr. Don on the show is actually by day a tenured academic. So first of all, do you mind just introducing yourself, say who you are and what you do? Sure. My name is Don Schaffner. I'm Distinguished Professor and Extension Specialist at Rutgers University. And what I do is I do research on microbiology and microbial food safety. and I also work with the food industry and the general public to understand more about food poisoning and how to prevent it.

16:19Dr. Don Schaffner has a different relationship to food poisoning than most of us. For most of us, sometimes we get sick, sometimes we call it food poisoning. Usually we move on not actually knowing for sure. Maybe we accuse a local Chili's to our friends. Dr. Don actually tries to get answers. What is safe to eat? What is not? When we get sick, what has actually happened inside our bodies. He has even researched stuff like, how true is the five-second rule? In case you've never heard of this rule, congratulations on growing up fancy. But the rule is, if you drop something on the ground and you pick it up within five seconds, it's safe to eat.

16:56It's maybe less of a rule, more of a secular prayer. Dr. Don actually studied this in his lab at Rutgers University. We studied four different foods. We studied watermelon. We studied like a gummy candy. we studied bread, and we studied bread with butter on it. Oh, that's such a good, I just want to compliment you on the foods you picked, because watermelon, I would never eat off the floor. Gummy candy, I probably would never eat off the floor. Bread, I think, I'd be like, well, what's going to stick to bread? And bread with butter is a real edge case. They briefly dropped each food on four different surfaces that had been slathered in bacteria to see what the bacteria would stick to.

17:36And of course, we did not drop them on the floor. We only dropped them onto stainless steel, carpet, wood, and something else that was relatively non-porous. What they learned is that the five-second rule, not as scientific as you may have hoped. What matters more than the length of time are factors such as the wetness of the food, the porosity of the floor surface. You don't want to eat face-down watermelon from your wood kitchen floor, even if you picked it up in a quick three seconds. But surprisingly, if you drop some buttered bread on a carpet, you might be okay, bacteria-wise. The reason is that bacteria often sinks to the bottom of the carpet, while your buttered bread may rest safely on top of the carpet fibers.

18:22Who knew? Do you have a hard time eating food in the world? Well, as my dearly departed friend who did not die from food poisoning, Dean Cliver used to say, the risks of not eating still outweigh the risks of eating. So if we stop eating, we will die. So no, I don't have trouble eating. I enjoy food. I enjoy food very much. There are certain foods I don't eat, but mostly because I don't like them, not because I'm super worried about them. I don't really like and I'm not super interested in eating rare or even medium hamburger. If I want a piece of beef that is cooked less, I will order a steak because most of the bacteria should be on the surface and the inside should be essentially sterile.

19:05Whereas with a burger, it's all chopped up and the bacteria are all the way through it. And so if you have a bacterial cell sitting in the middle of that rare or medium rare burger, it's likely to be there and it's not going to be killed by that light cooking process. So it does inform your eating a little bit. For sure, it does. For sure, it informs my eating. But I think the way, what did you say? Do you have trouble eating? I don't have any trouble eating. But I think about what I eat. I think about how long has that cantaloupe been sitting out at room temperature? And do I really want room temperature cantaloupe all that much?

19:42Or would I rather have a chocolate chip cookie? Like anything in life, you just have to decide what's worth the risk. There's a website that I do not recommend you visit called IWasPoisoned.com. If the FDA and CDC's food poisoning databases are a sober, no-nonsense list of possible dangers, IWasPoisoned.com is something else. A crowdsourced place where anyone, anywhere, can make an unsubstantiated claim of food poisoning. The posts typically include a short paragraph, a photo of the offending food, and then sometimes a picture of the resulting toilet. Someone in Knoxville reports Green Stool after eating special edition Green Dragon Marshmallow Lucky Charms.

20:28In Citrus Heights, California, a woman eats four Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supremes and says that for the next 24 hours, everything feels like it's in slow motion. There are 4 ,800 milligrams of sodium in four Crunchwrap Supremes. Reading IWasPoisoned.com, two thoughts occur. One, the food available to most of us in America is just not all that great. And two, saying you got food poisoning lies somewhere between speculation and slander. We often suspect we rarely know. Food poisoning is an accusation that gets hurled from toilets without most people spending, I don't know, several weeks, several months trying to research whether or not it actually transpired?

21:16I've learned from speaking to microbiologists that they don't actually really use the term food poisoning in a professional context. It belongs to us laypeople. Dr. Don Schaffner says that what we call food poisoning is really an umbrella term describing some biologically different experiences. We can broadly divide foodborne disease into two categories, right? Infectious illness and what we call intoxication. Now, intoxication, we're not talking about getting drunk. We're talking about a toxin that the body ingests. And so, for example, Staphylococcus aureus, that's an organism that is naturally found on people's skins.

21:54If the organism gets into food and the conditions are appropriate to allow the growth of the organism, then the organism grows. And as a byproduct of Staphylococcus aureus growing in food, it makes a toxin. And then when we ingest that food, because it is an intoxication, the response is almost always very quick within a couple of hours. And so one of the initial responses is vomiting. Foodborne intoxication is probably the condition that most of us think of as food poisoning. You eat something weird, your stomach feels funny, you vomit. But what's interesting is that with intoxication, typically, the toxin only reaches as far as our stomach.

22:36When we vomit, we're expelling the toxin, and we're usually fine. Dr. Don Schaffner says the second category of foodborne illness is a bacterial infection. For instance, if you eat something contaminated with salmonella, the salmonella actually passes through your intestine, attaches to your intestinal wall, and starts to multiply inside your cells, spreading to other cells. A day or two later, you'll develop flu-like symptoms, a fever, typically diarrhea. Your body senses that there is this foreign biological object, these salmonella cells that are inside your body, and it's starting to mount defenses against that.

23:12It's down to your immune system to basically identify those foreign objects and then fight back against them and get rid of them before the diarrhea or the infection kills you. So that's interesting. I would have assumed prior to talking to you, you know, there's been times where I've been a little bit ill and I've thought, do I have a significant issue? Do I have food poisoning? During those times when I got a fever, I would have taken that as evidence of, no, no, no, you're just sick is what I would have explained to myself. but a fever can be a response to an infection you get from food, attaching itself to your intestinal wall, and then working through your intestinal wall and getting into your cells.