Feds ramp up efforts to stop seafood fraud

Those plump and tempting scallops at the fish counter might be a lot smaller than they look -- a sodium-based compound can bloat scallops well past their actual size. And that fillet isn't such a good deal if the price includes the layers of ice glazed onto it to keep it fresh.

At the International Boston Seafood Show this week, a top U.S. seafood quality officer announced his agency was increasing efforts to stop these and other types of seafood fraud.

"We're going to take on the economic fraud concern," said Steven Wilson, chief quality officer at the National Marine Fisheries Service's seafood inspection program.

It won't be easy. Most seafood eaten in the United States is imported and packed outside the country. And the more fraud there is, the more that local industry members feel pressure to commit it to compete.

Perhaps the best known seafood fraud is species substitution, when sellers secretly replace a prized species with a similar tasting, cheaper fish -- whiting substituted for grouper, or mako shark for swordfish.

But fraud involving inaccurate food weights is far more common, Wilson said. Inspectors find some kind of fraud in at least 40 percent of all products submitted to them voluntarily. In at least eight out of 10 of those cases, inaccurate weights are the problem.

The problem with detecting the soaking or overglazing is that both involve legitimate ways to keep seafood fresh, so it's tough to tell when someone is cheating.

The law says a package labeled as 10 pounds of fish must contain 10 pounds of fish, with the ice glaze as extra, uncounted, weight. In 2010, an investigation by 17 states showed customers were often charged for the ice in seafood packaging, sometimes as much as $23 per pound.

The soaking of scallops and other seafood, such as shrimp, involves moisture retention agents that keep seafood fresh. A scallop is "a little sponge" that can absorb as much as half its own weight in water, Wilson said. "You're paying for water that's going to disappear when you cook the product."