Mislabeling seafood such as shrimp in North Carolina, research from UNC-Chapel Hill says. | Stock Photo
Mislabeling seafood such as shrimp in North Carolina, research from UNC-Chapel Hill says. | Stock Photo
Research from the undergraduate “Seafood Forensics” class at UNC-Chapel Hill determined that the mislabeling of seafood may be a huge problem in North Carolina.
The report, a portion of which was published on UNC's website on July 6, found that one-third of shrimp said to be local was actually a native species to the eastern Pacific called whiteleg. The results were presented in the publication called PLOS ONE.
“Mislabeling can give consumers the sense that a species, like red snapper, are plentiful in the ocean,” Professor John Bruno of UNC’s department of biology said in a new release on the university's website.. “In reality, it’s extremely overfished and quite rare now in most locations. It’s also hard to make environmentally sustainable choices with the food we eat when we don’t actually know what we’re buying or where it’s coming from.”
According to research from the journal PEERJ, out of 52 samples analyzed from restaurants, markets, and grocery stores, 90% of them were mislabeled, with restaurants mislabeling 100% of the time.
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