US “Origin Labeling” Law For Tuna Goes Into Effectff

That’s a good-looking piece of tuna there in the seafood case, but what exactly do you know about it? Where did it come from? What kind of upbringing did it have?

Would you like to run a quick background check before you take it home to meet your grill?

Starting Monday, grocery stores were supposed to be doing that for you. By federal law, they're now required to provide country-of-origin labels for all the fish and shellfish they sell and also to tell whether they came from the wild or from a farm.

Two groups are affected by this law in a major way: the distributors who have to provide the information and the consumers who get to use it. Or not.

Consumers are supposed to be the big winners here. But some win bigger than others.

Suppose people just generally like to “buy American” - or Canadian or Indonesian or whatever. Now they can do that with fish. Or suppose they think any tuna caught in the wild is better than a tuna raised on a farm -- or vice versa. Now they can cater to that fancy, too.

But what about hedonists who simply buy what they like? Or the virtuous souls who buy whatever provides the best nutrition - the least mercury, the most omega-3 fatty acids? The law won't be giving these folks any news they can use.

And then there are the people who want to support “sustainable fishing” - to only buy fish that are plentiful and have been caught or farmed in ways that don't hurt the environment or their fellow fish.

What can these people do with the new information they'll be getting? Advocates of sustainable fishing are optimistic that they'll put it to good use. That will take some doing, though.

”A lot of consumers out there already go and ask for this information,” said Jennifer Dianto, Seafood Watch program manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “But there's a whole population who don't want to do that, don't want to be confrontational.... And now they don't ever have to.”

In fact, some even hope that the new labels will bring more people into the sustainability fold. People will notice that they're getting this new information, said Jeff Jake, executive chef for The Lodge at Pebble Beach. And they'll figure it's there for a reason. “Then they'll go out and learn what they need to know to make decisions based on their values and their money.” He laughed about the money issue. “If you want to buy a house in Monterey County," he said, "you can't afford to buy wild salmon.” But, clearly, he hopes that people will buy wild salmon no matter what. That's the "sustainable" thing to do.

How are people supposed to know that though? Or to know it's more sustainable to buy albacore instead of bluefin tuna? It's pretty much impossible without referring to something like the Seafood Watch Pocket Guide published by the aquarium. The guide, which is updated at least once a year, lists various types of fish and -- when it matters -- tells their country (or state) of origin, whether they're farmed or wild, and how they were caught. Then it divides them into three categories: “best choices,” “good alternatives” and “avoid.”

Unfortunately, while it's readily available and can even be downloaded from the aquarium's Web site www.mbayaq.org, the guide isn’t usually posted in stores. And no doubt many shoppers do leave home without one.

But if they beat the odds and bring along a copy, it can open up a whole new world of possibilities. Those who are tempted to buy some imported king crab may be inspired to resist. Especially, perhaps, when they find they're allowed to indulge in some farmed caviar.

Farmed? Yes, farmed. That's counter-intuitive for the many people who think farmed is second best, at best.

“I would probably prefer the wild,” said Bill Prowse of Monterey, “although if I was really in the mood for fish, I'd probably buy the other, too.”

Even some sustainability advocates have this bias. “We buy only line-caught wild fish,” said Kirk Probasco, owner of Stokes Restaurant and Bar in Monterey. “We don’t do any farmed fish at all.”

Most sustainability experts, however, believe the rule is not so hard and fast, with pretty much everything depending on the farming methods. Operated poorly, fish farms can lead to disease and environmental problems.

”Salmon farmers in Vancouver produce as much raw sewage as the city of San Francisco on a daily basis,” Jake said.

On the other hand, an abalone farm under the commercial wharf does a beautiful job, Dianto said.

In fact, nearly half of the “best choices” on the guide are farmed. The guide also shows that “buying American” is not always the same as "buying sustainable." For example, snow crabs from Canada are a better choice than snow crabs from the United States.

But what if consumers have to choose between two packages of wild salmon, one from Alaska and one from California? According to the guide, they should choose the one from Alaska. But they'll have to take their chances because both packages will probably just say that the salmon is from the United States.

Or suppose they have to choose between two packages of shrimp, one trawl-caught and one trap-caught. According to the guide, trap-caught is preferable. But consumers won't know which package is which because the law doesn't require information about how fish are caught.

So there are flaws in the law from a sustainability point of view. And for people with a preference for products from the United States or a preference for wild instead of farmed fish, the law may even backfire.

There are reports of this already happening. Ever since he started using the new labels, one grocer has seen a nosedive in his sales of tilapia, a freshwater fish that looks a little like a sunfish. The labels say that it's farm-raised in Taiwan. And yet farm-raised tilapia - with country of origin not a factor - is a “best choice” on the guide.

This is probably an unexpected way in which the law may hurt distributors. Other negative effects - inconvenience, confusion, expense - were more predictable because wholesalers and grocers have had to make a sea change in their operations.

Wholesalers now collect the required information from their suppliers and then pass it along to the stores they deal with.

”There's a lot of paperwork involved,” said Rhonda Simon, sales manager at Pacific Harvest Seafood, a wholesaler in San Jose. “... It's thrown everybody into a tizzy.” For every piece of fish they handle there are records to keep. And keep and keep. Maybe for as long as two years, she said.

Developing their new system has been “very, very costly,” said Mark Garcia, operations manager at Pacific Harvest. And developing it was just the beginning. Now they have to maintain it, and for that Pacific Harvest has had to increase the hours for some of their workers. “That's not a cost we can pass on to our customers,” Garcia said and then joked, “At least, we haven't figured out how.”

For grocery stores, the major work has been “kind of a main office thing,” said Eric Johannes, seafood manager at Ralphs in Del Rey Oaks. That's where their whole system got switched over.

Now everything Johannes needs has been loaded into the computer, the way it always has been. There's just a lot more of it. He punches in new codes, and it punches out new tags.

Albertsons in Sand City began the new routine a few weeks ago. “I'm the one who's doing it,” said Carmen Hernandez, the butcher block supervisor there. “At first it was, like, so many tags, and ohhhhh.... But I'm getting used to it.... Every time it's less hard.”

Whole Foods in Monterey experimented with different approaches over the past few months, said store team leader Dan Wolfe. Since they sell fish by the pound from the case, not pre-packaged, they ended up going the one-sign-fits-all-the-tuna route, another-sign-fits-all-the-scallops, etc.

Overall, signs are that distributors are coping, some with more hassles than others. But then, there would probably be something fishy about a law that made life better for everybody.