User:MClarus23/Seafood

Processing[edit]
See also: Fish processing, Fish preservation and Surimi

Fish is a highly perishable product: the "fishy" smell of dead fish is due to the breakdown of amino acids into biogenic amines and ammonia.

Live food fish are often transported in tanks at high expense for an international market that prefers its seafood killed immediately before it is cooked. Delivery of live fish without water is also being explored. While some seafood restaurants keep live fish in aquaria for display purposes or for cultural beliefs, the majority of live fish are kept for dining customers. The live food fish trade in Hong Kong, for example, is estimated to have driven imports of live food fish to more than 15,000 tonnes in 2000. Worldwide sales that year were estimated at US$400 million, according to the World Resources Institute.

If the cool chain has not been adhered to correctly, food products generally decay and become harmful before the validity date printed on the package. As the potential harm for a consumer when eating rotten fish is much larger than for example with dairy products, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has introduced regulation in the USA requiring the use of a time temperature indicator on certain fresh chilled seafood products.

Fresh fish is a highly perishable food product, so it must be eaten promptly or discarded; it can be kept for only a short time. In many countries, fresh fish are filleted and displayed for sale on a bed of crushed ice or refrigerated. Fresh fish is most commonly found near bodies of water, but the advent of refrigerated train and truck transportation has made fresh fish more widely available inland.

Long term preservation of fish is accomplished in a variety of ways. The oldest and still most widely used techniques are drying and salting. Desiccation(complete drying) is commonly used to preserve fish such as cod. Partial drying and salting is popular for the preservation of fish like herring and mackerel. Fish such as salmon, tuna, and herring are cooked and canned. Most fish are filleted prior to canning, but some small fish (e.g. sardines) are only decapitated and gutted prior to canning.

Fish can also be processed into alternative seafood products; one prominent example of this is surimi. Surimi is essentially fish minced into a paste, which is then in turn manufactured into finished products like crab sticks, kamaboko, and fish sausages. Surimi first originated in Japan as a way to make more efficient use of unprofitable bycatch fish species and surplus catch. However, increasing demand and the invention of automated mass-processing onboard factory ships in the 1960s not only incentivized the industrialized production of surimi, but also led to the widely-abundant Alaska pollock species being targeted as its main ingredient. Today, surimi is a popular, standardized commodity that is both cheap and convenient, making it a worthy competitor to fresh fish.

Mislabelling[edit]
Main article: Seafood mislabelling

The global seafood industry is plagued by issues of traceability and mislabelling. Long seafood supply chains spanning great geographic distance effectively distance and alienate consumers from seafood producers—a reality exacerbated by globalization. As a result, consumers are often unable to make informed choices and this creates opportunities for mislabelling. Many seafood producers and distributors are incentivized by profit to mislabel, be it by renaming fish to make them more attractive, by substituting/passing off certain species as more profitable ones, by marking farmed fish as wild-caught fish, or even by mislabelling their products as eco-friendly when they are not in fact produced in a responsible manner. Such dishonest practices are often enabled, rather than monitored and regulated, by corrupt officials and fishery managers in both third-world and developed countries.

A 2013 study by Oceana found that one third of seafood sampled from the United States was incorrectly labelled. Snapper and tuna were particularly susceptible to mislabelling, and seafood substitution was the most common type of fraud. Another type of mislabelling is short-weighting,  where practices such as overglazing or soaking can misleadingly increase the apparent weight of the fish; the detection of water retention agents helps identify the fraud and its origin.

Among the main consequences of mislabelling are the health risks that are imposed upon consumers. For example, mislabelled canned tuna have been found to misrepresent the actual mercury content of the product. With regards to such food safety concerns, processed seafood commodities like surimi, as compared to fresh fish, are especially concerning as they easily mask the true appearance and origins of component ingredients.