Am I the victim of an international sushi scam? (Part 1)

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1:24I used to have this sushi spot that I'd order from pretty constantly. I'm not going to name it for reasons that'll become clear soon enough. One thing I need you to know about this restaurant, just to preemptively defend some of my own decision-making, is that they did have very good branding, which mattered because I'd never go in person. I would only order online. And on the food delivery app I used, this restaurant had the best-looking logo of any of the other sushi restaurants. It almost looked like a startup. And it wasn't just the logo. The photos of their food were also very beautiful. Perfectly lit, salmon roe glistening like tiny jewels.

1:56It was pretty, it was modern, it was expensive-looking. The sushi itself tasted pretty good, and despite the glitzy photos, it was also surprisingly cheap. I'd get the same thing every time, double order spicy tuna rolls. But there was a catch, which is that nearly every time I ate it, I would get sick. Sick enough that later, often from the bathroom, I would find myself Googling, sushi allergy? Or else, what are the ingredients in sushi? And then I'd read the ingredients. I'd see that I wasn't allergic to anything in sushi. There's not a lot of ingredients in sushi. And then sometime later, when I was hungry for sushi again, I'd order from the same place, and I'd usually get sick.

2:39Again. This happened dozens of times over a couple of years, and then one day, things changed for me. They changed because that day, I was in the bathroom, asking myself why I'd done this to myself yet again, and I finally Googled something new. Instead of Googling what's in sushi or sushi allergy, I Googled why would sushi make me shit my guts out. And that phrase opened up a kind of internet trap door into this whole other world of information that I had not been exposed to. The world of fish fraud.

3:17So what I read is that it was possible that the tuna rolls I was ordering did not actually contain tuna. that instead I might be eating a kind of fish called Escalar, also referred to as the Walu Walu, also referred to as the Exlax fish, and that a lot of people who eat Escalar have the same reaction I was having. If customers really knew about Escalar, they might steer clear because it's known as the Exlax fish. The Exlax fish. Laxative of the sea. It's a bottom feeder packed with an indigestible, waxy substance that can cause explosive, oily, orange diarrhea. Gross. People get radicalized online every day.

4:04No one ever thinks it's happening to them. When I first started poking around on this fish question, all I wanted to know was whether I personally had been chowing down on the X-Lax fish. And if I just never pulled on that one little loose thread, well, we can't go backwards. There isn't what could have been. There's only what happened. After the break, we get Walu Walu pilled.

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6:58to start can you just introduce yourself say your name and what you do for a living i'm peter marco i'm a professor of life sciences at the university of hawaii at manoa and i study biogeography and population genetics of marine organisms Peter and I were talking over Zoom. To start, I just told Peter about my misadventures, about my desperate Google searches, about my suspicion that this all might have something to do with a mysterious, gut-destroying fish called the Walu Walu. When I started Googling this sushi experience, I was sort of plunged into a world of academics talking about how in America, sushi can be like a three-card Ponty game a little bit where what people are ordering might not be what they're getting.

7:45And I just wanted to know what your research has shown and sort of how you even started poking at this question of fish in the States at all. I got into this field purely by accident. I was a brand new assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, and I wanted to run a class for graduate students on molecular biology techniques. And so I was thinking, well, what can we do? What can we do? Well, a colleague of mine who happens to also be my partner in life suggested, well, why don't you guys go down to a grocery and buy some seafood and, you know, bring it back to the lab and just extract DNA and identify it and just see what it actually is.

8:24So that was the idea for the experiment. But then, when Peter started thinking about what fish he'd want to test, he very quickly stumbled on a pretty good question. His question was about red snapper, a very sought-after, very popular fish. Once I had a look at fisheries landings for red snapper in the United States and how much red snapper was caught in the Gulf of Mexico and how much was imported from South America, I said, how is it that I can buy red snapper at any time of the year, in any quantity at any grocery in the Chapel Hill area. There wasn't nearly enough of this fish being caught and imported to supply every grocery in the United States.

9:03And my experience was that you would see Red Snapper everywhere. And so this is just impossible. How could all this be Red Snapper? So we keyed in on Red Snapper and collected them from groceries. Students got their relatives to send samples from around the southeast and the east coast and a few from elsewhere. And so we identified them using DNA sequencing. And so it turned out that I think it was 77 % of them weren't actually red snapper. 77 %? 77%, yeah. So it was a small sample of just 22 fish, but 77 % of them were not red snapper. It was really surprising, but at the time I didn't really understand the significance of it or think too much about it.

9:45But then, you know, we talked about it as a class and we said, well, maybe we could write this up into a paper. and we did and we ended up submitting it to the journal nature and they took it and they published it and uh the rest was history

10:03it got a lot of attention it somehow pinched a nerve with both scientists and uh consumers as well as people involved in the seafood industry there's a certain amount of like I don't know. You assume that there's like a, whatever your faith in society is, however paranoid you are or not paranoid you are. I guess I always assume that through some combination of regulation or just marketplaces, that at the end of the day, if you go to the grocery store and you buy something, the marshmallows are marshmallows and the hamburgers are hamburgers and the red snapper is red snapper. I think it undermines people's sense of reality a little bit.

10:43Absolutely, yeah. And if they found out the same thing about chicken or beef or marshmallows, they would have exactly the same reaction. And were you able to tell when you found yourself DNA testing supermarket Red Snapper, could you tell what fish it was instead, or can you just tell genetically this isn't Red Snapper? The answer to that is sort of yes and no. So when you sequence the DNA from an unknown subject, you try to identify it by comparing it to DNA sequences that are available on public databases. And the biggest one that is used around the world is called GenBank. So you can identify any sample you've got with a DNA sequence provided there is a sequence in GenBank to match it to.

11:30So in some cases, we were able to identify what the fish were. And in other cases, we couldn't because there were no reference sequences available in these databases to identify what it was. We could say it was a close relative of this thing, but we couldn't actually say what it was. It's crazy that we're eating things that we can't scientifically know what they are. It is kind of mind-boggling, yeah. And the idea that potentially you could discover a species that is well-known from the grocery aisle but not known to science is also kind of interesting to think about. Peter's study had started out as a fun classroom experiment, but he was so excited by what he found, he ended up doing a follow-up study using the same methods.

12:14Some fish are sold at a higher price because they're labeled as being caught using environmentally friendly methods. Peter used DNA testing to check if that labeling was always accurate. He found a lot of fraud there, too. But Peter says even though fish fraud is rampant, there's not a lot of funding available to study it, which makes it a harder problem to deal with. Where do you think the mislabeling happens? Like, do you think it's happening at the grocery store? Do you think it's happening from, like, the fishermen? Where in the distribution chain? I don't even really know how a fish goes from the ocean to a grocery store.

12:48Yeah, well, it's complicated in most cases, especially in the United States, because we import most of our seafood from other countries. Where does the mislabeling happen? Well, anywhere where some profit can be made, I would imagine. but seafood is particularly susceptible to this kind of substitution and fraud because the supply chain is so complex a fish that is caught on a hook can change hands five or six times and be modified a couple of times or processed a couple of times on its way to your plate so a fish could be caught in one country processed in another country imported to a third and then exported to the United States.

13:32When Peter talks about fish processing, what he means is everything that happens to a fish between it being caught and you consuming it. You can watch videos of all the in-between on YouTube, and apparently many people choose to. The three-minute clip titled Processing Fish somehow has over half a million views and zero comments. This fish is going to be washed. Washing the fish will remove the slimy slipperiness from the skin before it is prepared. The fish travels at the conveyor belt to the water. This woman's voice is incredibly soothing, unless I imagine you're a fish. The viewer watches as dead fish are poured from a crate onto a watery conveyor belt.

14:14At its most simple, processing is something a fisherman could do, just on a boat with a knife. But here, factory workers cut the fish's head off, eviscerate the fish's body, take out its guts and internal organs, and finally, its ribs. What's left is the filet. These people are experts at filleting fish. Look how quickly they can work. They can fillet thousands of fish a day. Such a large number of fish are not needed all at once, so some of the fish will be frozen. The tricky fact about fish is that there's over 30 ,000 species of them. In the water, they can look very different from each other.

14:48You would notice if someone swapped your goldfish for a great white. But by the time they're filleted, they're harder to distinguish. Salmon from tuna, sure. But in general, 30 ,000 biodiverse species end up, by the time humans are done with them, as some form of rectangular-ish mass, usually either white or pink. Or, in the case of this video, shaped like a stick, breaded and fried. The last stage is to pack the fish into boxes. All of that happens here in one factory, but as Peter Marco says, fish processing is often staggered across a long distribution chain. Each step, each pair of hands, an opportunity for fraud.

15:29So at every step, fish are often being processed to some degree. And so the more processing you get and the more steps there are in that supply chain, the more likely it is that you're going to have some sort of mislabeling or fraud because it becomes more and more difficult to identify what it is because it's becoming progressively more and more modified as it moves along the supply chain. That's in part why I think that it's unlikely that it's fishers responsible for very much mislabeling because they're dealing with whole fish. Right. And it's pretty hard to pretend that, you know, a whole red snapper, it isn't red snapper, actually is.

16:07Whereas once you start chopping it up or turning it into a fillet, then it becomes much easier. Peter says the same market forces that cause people to swap cheap fish for more expensive fish also drive other sorts of ethically suspect fish-based behavior. He told me it's not uncommon to hear stories about fish that have been banned from the U.S. for ecological reasons actually being snuck into the country, labeled as something else. There's just a lot of retailers out there, and there's a lot of time spent trying to stop fish at the border. You know, illegal imports of fish that are either illegally caught or from underreported fisheries or unregulated fisheries.

16:48People smuggle fish? Absolutely, yeah. There have been some really amazing and sort of notorious cases over the past 20 years of large amounts of illegal fish being imported into the U.S., largely fish being imported with the name of one thing but actually being something else. Okay, so it's not as if, like, it's not like someone's driving, like, a Toyota Corolla and there's like a bunch of fish in the door panels. It's like they're bringing the fish in in a normal way, but they're lying about what it is? Well, yes and no. So some illegal imports are fish coming in in huge containers of, say, rockfish being imported as a red snapper, right?

17:30And that's illegal. But Peter says there are also actually examples of smugglers sneaking fish into the country in trucks the way they would sneak in drugs. The best example is freshwater eel, an endangered species that many people still want to eat. Smugglers don't bring in the adult eel, they actually sneak in their larvae, the babies. So there's not enough adult eel out there to harvest, and the harvest is extremely limited for all these species. So the next best thing is to go out into nature and gather up the babies and then ship them off to aquaculture facilities in other countries. They don't look like much, but these eels are as valuable to smugglers as cocaine.

18:18This is from a TV news report. Law enforcement officers with guns storm a shady warehouse to find little pools of illegal eels. The adult eels look like big black snakes. There's something beautiful about them. The babies are little white squiggles. In the clip, a conservation advocate breaks down the economics of these schemes. You can get up to 100 ,000 glass eels in one suitcase. And if they're leaving Europe at a euro each, that's 100 ,000 pounds in your suitcase. And then at the other end, you grow them on in a pond in China. And a year later, that's a million, a million euros worth. Asia, where they're considered a delicacy.

19:01We're talking about huge amounts of money that are being exchanged for these glass eels because they're worth an awful lot. And is it like cartels and violence? I don't think so, but it's certainly fairly serious guys that are involved in this because it involves so much money. Wow. That's fascinating. Do you eat fish? Yeah, I do. I love seafood. Absolutely. How do you think about it? Like, do you eat it differently than I eat it? I don't know. I've never seen you eat. I consume it like a person who doesn't know that, you know, a large percentage of it might be mislabeled. And I've never thought very much about conservation when it comes to my seafood habits.

19:44Well, yeah, I always approach it kind of, you know, like from the scientist lens, like, oh, so I wonder what this is, or let's get this and see what it's like. So there are things that you can buy reliably, and you know what it's going to be, and it's not going to be mislabeled. Like what? Well, things like salmon. It's very hard to substitute something for salmon. Now, of course, there's the issue of wild-caught versus farm-raised salmon, where farm-raised salmon can be easily substituted for wild-caught salmon. But here in Hawaii, we have a sort of handful of basic fish that are sold at groceries.

20:19A number of them are caught here locally, and they have very distinctive tastes and flavors and textures, and there's just no way anybody is going to pull off a species substitution with those things. So I'm talking about Ahituna, Manchong, and another called Ono. These are fish that everybody knows, the population knows, and it's just not going to happen. So I buy those knowing that that's going to be what it is. when I see other unusual things, I may buy it and evaluate it with my taste buds. Rarely do I often test something genetically that I've eaten, although there's a story there too. Wait, what's the story?

20:59Well, it goes back to the original red snapper study with the students. These are grad students, and they're pretty cash-strapped, living bohemian lifestyles. So they had to go out and get these expensive red snapper fillets. And they were reluctant to ask for just little pieces because that would be sort of strange and odd. They didn't want to attract attention by buying tiny pieces of fish. So they bought fillets and I promised them I would reimburse them for every fillet out of my pocket, which I did. And so I ended up eating most of the fish that were bought in the study. And that's when I realized, I said, oh my gosh, this is really different.

21:36So I think I've only ever had red snapper twice before in my life, before this study, because of the high rate of substitution. It was so obvious that I was just sort of stunned by that. And subsequently, a reporter once asked me in the wake of that study, well, you know, so it's not red snapper. And it's, you know, most of these things are actually snappers. So what's the harm? I mean, they're basically all the same, aren't they? And I just said, so obviously you've never had Red Snapper or you don't remember the last time you had Red Snapper because he wouldn't say that. I think there's like a bargain most of us make with consumerism, which is that you go to the store and you buy things and you're not like interrogating whether what you're getting is what fits the label of the thing.

22:25But it sounds like the way you consume fish is as a skeptic a little bit? A little bit, but like I said, I mostly buy things that I know what they are. I buy them from reliable retailers, you know, once in a while. And it's typically in a restaurant. I'll get something and I'll say, okay, this is not mahi mahi. This is kind of ridiculous that you're trying to pass this off as mahi mahi because it's obviously tilapia. Will you say something? Not anymore. I mean, I've sort of gotten past the point of complaining about that because, I don't know, I sort of get tired of it. And I just now go to places where I know that I can reliably buy fish and get what I'm looking for.

23:10And that typically involves buying your own fish, cooking it yourself. Seafood fraud is a tricky thing to fix, but it could be done. It falls into a category I've begun to encounter somewhat frequently with Search Engine. National problems that could technically be solved if they became a priority, but which I can never really imagine becoming a priority. Solvable nuisances like daylight savings time, pennies, half-full potato chip bags, all the things you won't find in heaven. But Peter does say that when he publishes one of his studies, there is a moment of outcry and attention. Local news shows do their segments.

23:46The seafood you buy at the supermarket may not always be what it says on the label. You order red snapper, but you're served tilapia. It says tuna and you end up getting scrod. Maybe some podcaster does his less timely version a few years later. This week, is my local sushi restaurant running a scam on me? And when that article or episode comes out, everyone talks about it. For a week. Maybe two. But then, sometime soon after, everybody finds something else to talk about. It's just simply not a high enough priority for consumers and for regulatory agencies. I've got some ideas about what contributes to that, but it isn't currently a high enough priority to regulate at the level that would change a whole lot.

24:31And what are your ideas about why it doesn't? Because like for me, when I began to suspect that this one sushi place was not being honest with me, I stopped ordering from that sushi place. Why does everyone kind of just go back to eating funky fish? I think it's complex, but I think the way the public thinks about seafood contributes to it. I think one of the problems is that we don't think of fish as sort of wild animals. The ocean is really the only place on earth where we still harvest wild populations of organisms to eat. So on land, it's all agriculture. Even forestry products are just essentially agriculture, at least in North America.

25:15But fish, I think, Because they sit on the grocery aisle along with chicken and beef and very reliable things you can buy that you can always get when you go to the grocery store, I think seafood gets lumped into those things along with marshmallows and other sorts of products that are always there that have a familiar name and that are viewed as commodities, food, rather than wild organisms. Peter's view of the world, it's not that I'd never considered it. I just never considered it deeply. The human desire to consume animals has made many species no longer wild. But it's harder to do that with fish.

25:54They are stubborn in their wildness. With fish, we can't always have exactly what we want, but we want it anyway. And that's where the fraud comes in. Peter says that in the eternal war between value-seeking consumers and the companies which ripped them off, his work has actually given some consumers the upper hand. But since he began publishing, he's noticed that savvy restaurants and grocery stores have actually found a new tactic. Over the time that I've done these studies, it seems to me that one of the consequences of all this mislabeling evidence and studies is that fish just aren't labeled as specifically as they used to be.