Counterfeit Salmon

Businessmen can often sell higher quality and/or trendy products for fat mark-ups because people are willing to pay more for them. Competitors quickly notice this. An easy but disreputable way to horn-in on such an opportunity is to market counterfeit goods...cheaper products with similar, if not identical labels.

"Wild salmon" currently has market cachet because it's a natural, organic product (even though its consumers are eating endangered species). Farmed salmon is perceived as inferior by many because it's produced in aquatic feedlots and subjected to growth hormones, pesticides, dye to make its flesh pink, etc. No surprise that we're now finding farmed salmon sold as wild salmon at wild salmon prices.

Fresh wild salmon from West Coast waters used to have a low profile in New York: it generally migrated eastward in cans. But a growing concern about the safety of farm-raised fish has given fresh wild salmon cachet. It has become the darling of chefs, who praise its texture and flavor as superior to the fatty, neutral-tasting farmed variety, and many shoppers are willing to pay far more for it than for farmed salmon.

Today, "fresh wild salmon" is abundant, even in the winter when little of it is caught. In fact, it seems a little too abundant to be true.

Tests performed for The New York Times in March on salmon sold as wild by eight New York City stores, going for as much as $29 a pound, showed that the fish at six of the eight were farm raised. Farmed salmon, available year round, sells for $5 to $12 a pound in the city.

For shoppers, said David Pasternack, the chef and an owner at Esca, a theater district fish restaurant, buying authentic wild salmon "is like a crapshoot."

The findings mirror suspicions of many in the seafood business that wild salmon could not be so available from November to March, the off-season. Wild and farmed salmon fillets and steaks look similar because farmed fish are fed artificial coloring that makes them pink, but that coloring can be measured in laboratory testing.

Because of the limited availability and cost of wild salmon, 90 percent of the salmon sold in the U.S. is farmed. Considering the fishing seasons for wild salmon, there are times of the year when wild salmon should be all but unavailable. However, few fish markets seem to be suffering from such supply limitations.

The article goes on to list the wide variety of excuses retailers gave for selling as wild salmon what test results showed to be farmed salmon. There were mistakes in the stockroom, lost paperwork, a claim that all Canadian wild salmon are farm raised, supplier error, etc. I'm sure that in some cases, the retailers were indeed hoodwinked by their suppliers.

In one case, testing showed that a salmon had considerable evidence of both captive and wild living, meaning that it was probably born to a farm and escaped at some point. The article made no differentiation between wild and hatchery salmon, whose captive life is rather short.

Laura Fleming, a spokeswoman for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, a state agency that promotes wild seafood, said, "The symptom is not confined to Manhattan." She added, "We've had calls from various places around the country over the last several years from indignant fans telling us that stores are promoting product as wild Alaskan salmon when in fact it is not wild salmon at all."

"The extent of the problem is certainly surprising," Ms. Fleming said, "especially in a place like New York, where the most sophisticated consumers in the country live, people who really scrutinize a purchase."

Federal regulations governing country-of-origin labeling took effect on Monday. They require fish to carry a paper trail back to the source, but they apply to full-service markets like grocery stores, not to fish markets.

Joseph Catalano, a partner at Eli's and the Vinegar Factory who is responsible for the fish those markets sell, said he was not surprised by the test results. "The bottom line on all this is money," he said.

Faced with fillets of wild and farmed salmon, even renowned chefs like Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin and Mr. Pasternack of Esca, who pay top dollar for the choicest seafood, could not visually distinguish one from the other. After the fillets were cooked, however, they could taste the difference.

"The most obvious clue is flavor," said Ms. Fleming of the Alaskan agency, "but by that time it's too late."

Stories like this one need to get more publicity so that customers will have the education to back up their discerning tastes. I doubt there are many salmon consumers who can tell by taste the difference between wild and farmed salmon. So, they need to know beyond the label what salmon they can trust. Publicity of this issue would motivate honest retailers to validate and highlight their authentic wild salmon, and customers would learn whose stock they could rely upon.