Fish fraud may have a silly name, but it is no laughing matter ("Not all Maryland crab cakes as local as advertised," April 1). It's a practice that costs consumers and hurts the entire seafood community. DNA testing and stepped up enforcement of laws already on the books is undoubtedly the path to stamping out this unsavory practice.
Uncovering where the mislabeling happened and focusing regulatory resources on that critical control point is an important piece of the puzzle. Pointing fingers at the convenient and faceless boogeyman known as "imports" is not only a misguided approach, it's ignorant.
The latest report from Oceana on mislabeled menus in Maryland and the subsequent reporting on it talks a lot about imported crab meat. There's coded discussion of mislabeling that "can occur far from American shores" and how misbranding "can occur well before crabmeat enters the United States." But in reality, that's not what the testing found. In fact, the group didn't conduct a single test on the labeled cans of pasteurized meat that is actually imported. Yet innuendo and nuance abounds. Because we're just talking about those imports, right? Wink, wink.
Let's talk about those imports. Did you know the U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that imported seafood helps create 8,062 jobs in the state of Maryland and $1.4 billion in sales? Oceana's report did not find evidence that imported crab products are mislabeled.
How about we clean up our own yard before we point misguided fingers at our neighbors?
Richard Barry, McLean, Va.
The writer is program manager for the National Fisheries Institute.