Oceana Study Uncovers Massive Crab Cake
Fraud in D.C. Area
Posted by Jessica Sidman on Apr. 1,
2015 at 8:19 am
Three years ago, I did a little
experiment to find out how often restaurants that advertise "Maryland crab
cakes" on their menus really serve Maryland crab. AtP.J. Clarke's, I asked
a server about the origin of its "Maryland crab cake," and he assured
me it was "all local." But when I later asked the then-chef the same
question, he told me the bulk of the seafood actually came from Indonesia and
the restaurant sometimes gets “a few pounds” of Maryland crab and blends it in.
Busboys and Poets likewise advertised
"Maryland crab cakes" at the time. "It says it’s from Maryland,
but it’s from China,” the server told me when I inquired about its origin. The
restaurant's Director of Operations, however, later countered that it actually
came from Venezuela.
Needless to say, it's hard to know
where your crab is really coming from, no matter how it's labeled.
Oceana has only confirmed this with a
new study released today that found 38 percent of Chesapeake Bay crab cakes
tested in this region were mislabeled. The ocean conservation and advocacy
organization was inspired by my story on "Maryland Crab Fakes" and
decided to repeat the investigation on a much larger scale with the help of
actual DNA testing. "You did a whole mislabeling story without submitting
one test and I thought, 'That's brilliant,'" says Oceana senior scientist
Kimberly Warner, the report's author.
The organization visited 86 restaurants
throughout the D.C. and Maryland in 2014 and gathered samples of 90 crab cakes
advertised as using "blue crab" or "Maryland crab." Oceana
selected restaurants based on their online menus, but if the actual restaurant
menu only listed "crab cake," the investigators would ask servers to
confirm whether it was blue crab or not.
They then sent the specimens to a lab
that used DNA testing to determine the crab species. Nearly four out of 10 crab
cakes contained crab imported from elsewhere, including Indo-Pacific waters and
the Mexican Pacific coast. Much of this imported crab is fished unsustainably
or even illegally. Oceana did not include crab cakes labeled as
"Maryland-style" in the study, although those can be just as
misleading.
The mislabeling could be even more
widespread than that. The DNA tests were unable to determine if the crabs were
local, only that they were blue crabs, which are the type of crabs found
locally. "These fraud rates are conservative because the DNA tests didn't
say where that blue crab was from. It could have been from Venezuela or Canada
or wherever else the blue crab roams," Warner says.
Oceana does not release the names of
the restaurants involved in the study because they don't know where in the
supply chain the mislabeling occurred. It might not necessarily be the restaurant's
fault; one of the distributors or even the fishermen could be responsible.
"Without greater transparency in the food chain, we can't tell where
mislabeling occurs," Warner says.
The Maryland Department of Natural
Resources has tried to increase transparency around the marketing of crab cakes
with the 2012 launch of True Blue, a voluntary program to promote restaurants
and retailers that use real Maryland crab. To qualify as True Blue, restaurants
must use a minimum of 75 percent Maryland crab meat in their annual purchases.
(Local crab is only available 75 percent of the year.) The restaurants can then use a True Blue logo
on their menus and marketing materials. The state fisheries service randomly
checks invoices at least two times a year to make sure participating
restaurants have purchased Maryland crab meat recently.
Today, around 200 restaurants have
signed on to True Blue. But Warner says even some participants in the program
were found guilty of mislabeling. Although she's not disclosing restaurant
names to the public, she has disclosed them to the Maryland Department of
Natural Resources.
"It's along the lines of someone
having grouper on the menu and giving you catfish," says Maryland's
Fisheries Marketing Director Steve Vilnit. "It's a completely different
species of animal. It's not the same thing at all."
Vilnit says he's auditing all of the
purchases for those True Blue restaurants that mislabeled during the period of
Oceana's study. (He wouldn't say how many there were.) "Anybody that is in
our group that did not pass is going to be on a high-watch list for the next
year," Vilnit says. "Unfortunately, the True Blue program isn't a
perfect program as I am a staff of one."
Vilnit says he's looking into the
possibility of Maryland implementing its own DNA testing system some day. In
the meantime, he says focusing on getting consumers to True Blue restaurants
rather than signing on more restaurants, especially given the limit of local
crabs. "If I'm a chef and I'm putting a more expensive crab meat on the
menu because I'm trying to do the right thing, and nobody buys it, it doesn't
do anybody any good."
