Oceana targets fishy labeling practices RESTAURANTS Group visits restaurants nationwide, testing menus - is that halibut really halibut or a lesser creature?

Geoff Shester, California program director for Oceana, takes a sample from a dish labeled as wild sturgeon in a restaurant in S.F. The nonprofit sends samples for DNA testing to confirm fish are identified correctly. less Geoff Shester, California program director for Oceana, takes a sample from a dish labeled as wild sturgeon in a restaurant in S.F. The nonprofit sends samples for DNA testing to confirm fish are identified ... more Photo: Sonja Och, The Chronicle Photo: Sonja Och, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Oceana targets fishy labeling practices 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

The braised chunk of fish labeled "Local Halibut Filet" at a posh San Francisco restaurant where a group of food sleuths were eating looked appetizing, but the first two bites were forked into a little plastic container filled with a preservative salt concoction.

Later that day, Geoff Shester, California program director for the nonprofit group Oceana, would send the preserved morsels, along with more than 30 other samples taken from a variety of San Francisco restaurants, to a laboratory for DNA testing.

The idea, he said, is to find out whether the halibut - plus the sand dabs, Pacific snapper, wild sturgeon and other fish sold at local restaurants - was actually what the menu said it was and determine if, as advertised, the seafood was really wild and local or if it was shipped from a fish farm.

It is now possible to determine exactly what species is being served at the local fish shack, thanks to recent advances in genetic sequencing. Oceana, a group dedicated to preserving the ocean ecosystem, is testing fish nationwide to find out whether seafood fraud is as widespread as some people think it is.

Get what you pay for

"There is a huge demand now for sustainable seafood, so we need mechanisms to reward and create market incentives for sustainable fishing that take into consideration the health of the ocean," Shester said.

"Providing a marketplace where consumers pay more for products they know are sustainable is the only way to create incentives for responsible, sustainable practices," Shester said. "The rug gets pulled out from under the whole thing if you aren't getting what you think you are getting."

The problem is that, in many cases, there is no way for the consumer to know whether the fish is what the restaurant, fish market or grocery store claims it is.

Shester said that could change as testing becomes more widespread. New technology has made it easier to detect fraudulent fish. The genetic tests his group is conducting cost $20 to $200 apiece, depending on a sample's purity - lemon sauces are particularly problematic.

Breaking the law

Misbranding food for financial gain is illegal under state and federal law. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration publishes a guide of acceptable market names for certain fish species, but the laws can be complicated. The agency, for instance, lists 14 species that can be labeled "tuna."

Oceana has thus far found seafood mislabeling everywhere it has done testing, including Boston, Los Angeles, Miami and Monterey. The group hopes to test fish platters in at least six coastal cities around the country.

The DNA-testing campaign, in which dozens of volunteers are provided testing kits with instructions and monitoring sheets, created an uproar when the early results came out. In South Florida, Shester said, results showed that 31 percent of the fish tested at restaurants and markets was mislabeled.

In Los Angeles, 55 percent, and in Boston, 48 percent of the fish sold was not what it was touted to be, he said.

Bad surprise

A closer look at the results in Los Angeles showed that eight out of nine sushi samples labeled as "white tuna," or shiro maguro, were actually escolar, which Shester calls the "ex-lax fish" for its purgative effect on the digestive system. Escolar is not among the 14 species that can legally be labeled as tuna.

Oceana found that 87 percent of the sushi venues tested misrepresented the fish being served, the worst record of any type of restaurant. Thirty-one percent of grocery stores misidentified fish, Shester said.

One of advocates' biggest concerns is the unadvertised use of shark meat in fish tacos, Shester said, because, among other reasons, sharks often contain high concentrations of mercury.

Serious illnesses occurred in 2007 after toxic puffer fish were mislabeled as monkfish in an attempt to circumvent U.S. import restrictions, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

The San Francisco results will not be in for another eight weeks, Shester said. So far, Monterey is the only Northern California location where results are in, thanks to volunteers at the Monterey County Weekly newspaper. The staff there found that seven out of the 19 samples taken at local restaurants, 37 percent, were mislabeled.

The results follow several Consumer Reports studies that had similar results, including a 2006 report that found that 56 percent of the salmon marketed in the United States as wild was actually farmed.

Feds' crackdown

The difficulty tracking seafood fraud prompted Food and Drug Administration regulators to announce in 2011 that they would begin DNA testing at selected sites, but there is no nationwide monitoring system.

Last month, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., introduced the Safety and Fraud Enforcement for Seafood Act. The legislation, which has bipartisan support, would set up a national system to trace seafood. The idea, advocates say, is to prevent the kind of fraud and mislabeling that costs American fishermen money by allowing illegally captured fish, some of them protected species, to be sold under phony names.

Shester's recent visit to the fancy San Francisco seafood restaurant was particularly intriguing, he said, because the menu included a passage about how all its seafood is "purchased daily with quality and sustainability our highest goal."

He and colleague Ashley Blacow are looking forward to finding out if the halibut was locally caught, as the menu claimed. Halibut, they said, is a commonly substituted fish, and there are not very many halibut lingering off the San Francisco coast.