Seafood served in Washington, D.C., restaurants is sometimes mislabeled, according to a new study.
Using DNA barcoding, researchers found that 33 percent of seafood dishes tested at restaurants across the city were potentially mislabeled. But the mislabeling mainly involved substitutions of closely related species, the study found.
“While we found a high degree of mislabeling, the errors involved closely related species and we did not identify egregious substitutions as have been found in other cities,” the researchers wrote in the article published in the journal PeerJ. “This is consistent with the 33 percent average rate found across United States cities by Oceana and lower than seven of the 12 cities surveyed in that study (although higher than the 26 percent found in Washington, D.C. by Oceana in 2013),” the authors wrote.
Researchers from George Washington University tested two seafood dishes each from six restaurants in Washington, D.C. in March, 2015. After DNA testing, two fish did not match the species reported by the restaurants.
Bobby Van’s “Rock Shrimp Tempura” sample matched DNA for the Whiteleg shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei), a farmed shrimp, according to the authors.
However, the “Gulf shrimp”-labeled dish from Gordon Biersch and the calamari dish from Bobby Van’s Steakhouse were accurate.
