SUPERMARKETGURU FOOD &
HEALTH WEEKLY NEWSFLASH!
Safe Seafood, By The Numbers
Published on: February 23, 2005
If one New Hampshire company has its way, the nation’s consumers soon should be able to tell how much seafood they should eat in a given month, based on the level of mercury and PCBs found in individual species of fish.
A company called Seafood Safe has created, in consultation with educators and health officials, a sliding scale that rates various species of seafood and determines how many four-ounce servings the average person should eat in a given month. The label can be applied to frozen, packaged or fresh products, and the program subscribed to by retailers or suppliers; the goal, according to Seafood Safe CEO Henry Lovejoy, is to create a standard that could be easily understood by consumers and businesses.
The impetus for developing the scale came from recent lawsuits in California, in which the government charged that restaurants and retailers were not doing enough to inform pregnant women about the levels of PCBs and mercury in seafood, and how much they could safely consume. Lovejoy says that this is a "hot issue," and in fact the scale uses as its "average consumer" a woman of child-bearing age (18-45) who is about 145 pounds. Consumers who do not fit that description will be able to go on the organization’s website, www.SeafoodSafe.com, and determine how their differences in gender, age and body weight affects how much seafood they can eat.
While not every fish is tested, the program does use random sampling to determine how the fish are rated; larger, fatty fish tend to "bio-accumulate" more and therefore are a greater risk to consumers. "You can have a 15 pound swordfish and a 250 pound swordfish," says Lovejoy, "and the 250 pound swordfish will have exponentially higher levels of mercury or PCBs."
Lovejoy says that the company’s website also will provide "cumulative consumption" charts that can be easily printed out and put on a bulletin board or refrigerator door, telling consumers what amounts of various kinds of fish they can mix and match.
For the moment, the Seafood Safe label will be found primarily on EcoFish products, also owned by Lovejoy, which are made up of sustainable harvested seafood items packaged with marinades, rubs or spice kits, and sold primarily in more than 1,000 natural-food stores. But Lovejoy says that there are indications that the industry as a whole will adopt the practice – in part to indemnify itself from potential lawsuits, and in part because it makes available a process and communications vehicle that is needed and, to this point, has not been available.
