Monday, October 4, 2010

Where does our fish come from? A quick look at the origins of fish in Canadian stores, PART 2 of 2

In our last post, we visited several supermarkets in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, to see how much we could find out about the origins of the fish for sale.

The sad truth was that we didn’t find out much. Very little information could be found by looking around the fish section and reading packages, and asking an employee wasn’t much more helpful.

We wanted to see if we would see the same kind of trends at a specialty seafood market.
 
We chose to visit the Seafood Shop located in St. John’s. The Seafood Shop had a much larger variety of locally caught fresh fish including cod, halibut, flounder, salmon, trout, lobster and scallops.

Of course, when looking at the selection of frozen fish products we saw products originating in, or processed in, foreign countries, as Thailand, Vietnam or India, as well as products such as ocean perch where no origin was provided on packaging.

Still, in general, the fresh fish variety available was more extensive than that offered in supermarkets— the fresh fish case was the centre of the store, with a better display than supermarkets and the store workers were helpful and had good knowledge of the fish they were selling and its origin. Still, there were no labels, brands, marks, or information available for the consumer to distinguish between locally-caught and imported fish, or the conditions under which it was captured.

In conclusion, it seems we have a poor knowledge about what we eat, and very limited options when it comes to supplementing our understanding of the origins of our fish products.

We would love to see a more responsible, proactive attitude by stores in this sense. Change could also be influenced by governments and institutions, who could introduce initiatives in order to resolve the current lack of public information/awareness.

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