In Baked Sooner Country, Talk Is Of Fish...Is That Your Best Tilapia?...No, That's Flounder!...

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
Editor of The Tribune

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK - Big Time pro basketball is big and getting bigger here. The local National Basketball Association franchise made the playoffs this year. Other than a mean tornado or two, it's been the year's best excitement. But, then, some things that at first seem not to fit the geography, like basketball in this rabid football state, somehow find that unique niche that works. Fishing in Oklahoma isn't a state attraction, for example. You need more water than what this dusty and flat panhandle-shaped shank of the U.S. has to offer. The joke around here is that there are more bottles of water in Oklahoma convenience stores than there are ponds, lakes, canals, rivers, ravines or even semi-large puddles after a rainstorm.

One doesn't come to Oklahoma City to eat seafood, however. Cape Cod in New England, along the Atlantic, is the place for that. San Francisco does right by the Pacific catch out west. Rolling in here, we thought it would be some Dust Bowl tale we'd be writing, or maybe something about the Oklahoma City bombing, or maybe something about the exciting Oklahoma City Thunder and its spectacular superstar, the former Texas Longhorn Kevin Durant.

But nooooooooooooooooh.

It's fish.

Fish is on my mind today. Yesterday, I unfolded a week-old edition of The New York Times taken from my stack at home and read a story about how the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is having a devil of a time policing stores and restaurants. Why? It seems fish is being mislabeled right and left. Labeling fraud, is how the usually staid FDA characterizes it, and it is a big, big problem from coast to coast.

That Mahi-Mahi you picked up at the store? It may not be such a thing. It could be flounder. That Grouper may be catfish. The problem, says the government, is rampant.

And it's a big deal. The pricing of fish in restaurants often is based on what it claims on the menu. But cheap fish apparently is being substituted for expensive fillets. "Yellowtail stands in for mahi-mahi," read the story in The Times. "Nile perch is labeled as shark, and tilapia may be the Meryl Streep of seafood, capable of playing almost any role."

If you don't know fish, you're at the mercy of the store or the seafood restaurant. But the FDA believes customers have a right to know what they're buying and they also have the right to get what they're paying for. The fraud is being seen even in the best restaurants, say critics. They blame the FDA for being lax in monitoring fish as it comes in from overseas. Labeling, say those critics, is not a priority in other countries, where fish simply is a bigger part of the daily diet and consumers aren't as picky. And so, the U.S. is being pressured to effect new fish identification policies, such as using "genetic bar codes" to label the fish properly before sending it on its way to stores and restaurants with the correct ID. You see trout on the store's package; you want trout on your dinner plate.

According to the FDA, 84 percent of all seafood consumed in America comes from foreign countries. Another approach the agency is considering is use of DNA testing, which provides what the FDA is calling "gene sequencing;" that is, the tracking of fish by species as it arrives from, say, Japan and is packaged for sale. With that in place, inspectors will be able to identify misbranding during routine checks of distributor supplies, store stock and restaurant kitchens.

"If you're ordering steak, you would never be served horse meat," Dr. Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist of the nonprofit group Oceana, is quoted as saying in The Times. "But you can easily be ordering snapper and get tilapia or Vietnamese catfish."

For unsuspecting fish lovers, the only thing that matters is taste.

The average diner is not knowledgable enough to be able to identify the majority of fish being served or smart enough to know the difference in taste, however minimal when it is, say, drowned by some sort of chef's choice sauce or another. It's a crapshoot, apparently. You ask for swordfish and get mako shark. Does it matter? No, unless you happen to know the difference. Most of us do not.

One way to be sure is to order a whole fish.

You still may not know exactly what it is, but the odds are a bit better that you just might...

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