Those prawn balls you tucked into last night may not have been prawn at all, maybe not even “seafood”, according to an investigation by the Guardian newspaper. Fish fraud is rife across the world and has implications for omnivores who say they can’t switch to vegan and be without their favourite piece of dead fish.

Every omnivore ‘foody’ has their favourite type of dead animal or animal byproduct that they just couldn’t be without, or at least that’s what they say when asked why they can’t go vegan. For many it’s cheese, or eggs in the morning, or so-called “seafood”. So adamant are lovers of tuna steaks, pan-seared king scallops, or deep-fried prawn balls from the local takeaway, that there is no way they could ever be without them and switch to a healthier, less harmful plant-based diet.

But what if we told you that what you think you’re eating may not in fact be what you think it is. It may not even be of an animal from the sea, according to a report out in the Guardian today, that found that of 9,000 samples taken from restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets in more than 30 countries, 36 per cent were labelled and sold as something else.

Many of the studies used relatively new DNA analysis techniques. In one comparison of sales of fish labelled “snapper” by fishmongers, supermarkets and restaurants in Canada, the US, the UK, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, researchers found mislabelling in about 40% of fish tested. The UK and Canada had the highest rates of mislabelling in that study, at 55%, followed by the US at 38%...

...Other substitutions are more unsettling. For example, mixed seafood products such as prawn balls bought in Singapore markets recorded a mislabelling rate of 38.5%. The prawn balls repeatedly contained pig DNA, researchers found.

Never can someone claim to love and never be without fish, prawns or any other aquatic creature on their plates, when there’s a chance they may never have eaten what they believe they had. For example, tilapia is often labelled as red snapper, while prawn balls could be pig flesh. If you’re in the UK, mislabelling occurs more than half of the time, meaning there’s a greater than one-in-two chance that you ate something else. Let that sink in.

Even more worrying, mislabelling could have nutritional consequences and even be harmful. Escolar, often sold as some varieties of tuna, is an oilfish that is harder to digest causing problems for the elderly or anyone with gut issues. Other fish carry parasites harmful to humans, and tilapia has lower levels of omega-3 than red snapper.

So-called “fish laundering” is also fuelling criminality and brings into question claims by omnivores about the ethics and sustainability of their food. The considerable financial incentives of labelling one type of sea creature as another that would sell for more are obvious, leading to illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) catches by large “distant” fleets, in which ships with flags from other countries operate in the seas off South America, Asia and Africa.

Often, the catches are processed on board large transshipment vessels, where mislabelling and mixing of legal and illegal fish is done in relative secret. The risk of getting caught is low because monitoring and transparency is weak along the seafood supply chain. “People can make a lot of money doing this.”

Rashid Sumaila, from the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, calculated in a 2020 study that 8 to 14 million tonnes of fish are illegal caught and mislabelled every year. He is quoted in the Guardian as saying it was “like 15 to 20 million cows being stolen every year,” in terms of weight.

That this is not more of a scandal really highlights the speciesism rife in our society, if we think back to the horsemeat scandal that rocked the UK in 2013. People were horrified that their dead cow burgers could in fact contain dead horse flesh, as if it makes a difference. As advocates, we very often ask non-vegans to tell us the difference between pigs and dogs, although we also mistreat and exploit dogs terribly when it comes to things like greyhound racing and animal testing. Why then should people not be equally horrified that the species of fish they’re eating could be an entirely different species altogether? Horses and cows, pigs and dogs, they’re all mammals just different species, after all, just like tuna and escolar, or tilapia and red snapper, are all different species of fish. But of course, when all is said and done, morally it shouldn’t matter who we’re eating - yes, be outraged by the consistency of the fraud, but also recognise that whether it is a prawn or a pig, a life has been taken unnecessarily.

Our point is that “seafood fraud” picks yet more holes in the foundations of belief held by most non-vegans. Love a certain kind of fish? You don’t because you can’t know for sure that you even know what it tastes like. Think fish is sustainable? It could have been caught illegally and mislabelled because it’s as easy to do as changing a label on a box while out at sea. Think fish is healthy and full of essential fatty acids? It could be full of parasites, be hard to digest and have far less omega-3. 

Why trust your conviction in a food when you can’t trust that food at all? No one ever mistook a vegetable for something else.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager at Surge.

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