Jul 27, 2021 01:17 AM
Fish fraud is rampant — and Subway's tuna scandal is just the tip of the iceberg
https://www.salon.com/2021/07/26/fish-fr...e-iceberg/
EXCERPT: . . . Needless to say, it was alarming to read a report that a New York Times investigation into the sandwich's tuna found "no amplifiable tuna DNA," suggesting that the so-called tuna sandwich was not, in fact, tuna fish.
[...] Tuna isn't the only fish that has fraud problems. Oceana, a nonprofit ocean conservation group, began to investigate seafood fraud in 2011 and has since uncovered troubling patterns. In 2016 the group released a report about the worldwide scope of seafood fraud that detailed a pervasive, stomach-churning cheat of unsuspecting consumers. On average, one out of five of the more than 25,000 samples of seafood that they tested from 55 countries were mislabeled, with the trend occurring at every stage of the supply chain.
[...] So why is fish fraud prevalent? The answer boils down to lack of regulation, poor regulatory bodies, and the profit motive — in other words, capitalism behaving as usual. [NOTE: This is Salon's left political bias injecting itself into the issue.]
[...] "Another big challenge is something called trans-shipment at sea. Your average person would assume that a boat goes out, catches fish, and then comes back into port, sells those fish, and then goes back out, catches more fish. Instead, tuna vessels often handover their catch to another boat at sea and just keep fishing."
[...] "I'm very happy to see law enforcement getting involved," Larry Olmsted, author of "Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don't Know What You're Eating and What You Can Do about It," told Salon at the time. "Mislabeling is rampant in the seafood industry, and if you can't reliably get the fish you want in a port city like New York, just imagine what levels of fraud are like further inland. This business has had a fraud problem for years and years and the only people tracking it have been public interests groups."
Without regulation, us consumers may spend our lives worrying that the purveyors of succulent fish steaks, flavorful sushi rolls and moist crab cakes may be lying to us. That leaves us with a choice: take an informed risk, or avoid seafood altogether — even if that means, in my case, giving up on delicious Subway tuna hoagies... (MORE - details)
‘Lockdown is a class war by proxy’
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/07/27...-by-proxy/
EXCERPTS: . . . Sohrab Ahmari is op-ed editor at the New York Post and author of The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos. He joined Spiked’s editor for the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation...
Brendan O’Neill: One aspect of your book that really connects with me is the discussion of data against morality, or facts against truth. [...] How do you understand the emergence of this obsession with data, and how it relates to the diminishing role given to moral truth?
Sohrab Ahmari: Roughly 400 years ago, the modern scientific method emerged. Since then, it has yielded incredible discoveries about the physical workings of nature. Science is a very noble enterprise, and it deserves all the credit we can give it. The problem began when people attempted to impose the scientific way of understanding the world on everyone. This worldview holds that the only things that are truly knowable are these things we call facts, which we can generally express in mathematical language. Everything else [...] is provisional and subjective...
Scientists are now treated as the ultimate arbiters. With the vaccine, we have come close to conquering Covid. In my view, we have conquered it. Science has allowed us to do that. But when making decisions about the pandemic, we prioritised one way of knowing at the expense of all others. Politicians just gave up their brains to people like Anthony Fauci and Neil Ferguson.
Leaders should consider all sorts of things that Fauci or Ferguson can’t tell them about...
O’Neill: That problem is probably going to intensify. Over the past 18 months, scientists have become almost like philosopher-kings, telling us how to think and how to live...
One of the problems with this trend is that it reduces humankind to such an extraordinary degree. ... There is this incredibly reductionist view of human life...
Ahmari: CS Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man that if man wants to become a mere fact, he will. When we see humans as facts, they can be dehumanised. There is no longer anything special about them...
Having tasted what lockdowns can do, I’m very worried about them being applied to climate change. [...] For people like you and me, who can do much of our work from laptops, it works out too. It only really hurts working-class people. I’m not a Marxist. But the class dimension of this is undeniable, even for a conservative like me. A kind of class warfare by proxy is taking place, through the mechanisms of lockdowns, wokeness and climate change. Tensions between classes are getting mystified so our leaders don’t really deal with fundamental economic injustices.
O’Neill: One of the other paradoxes of the time we live in is that conservatives often seem to care more about working-class people than the left does. The left has abandoned economic concerns in favour of a culture war, hasn’t it?
Ahmari: There’s a funny Italian cartoon that shows the progression of the left-wing activist through the decades. In the 19th century, the point of concern for the left was the chimney-sweeping orphan boy in a Victorian town. Then, it was the industrial worker. But by the time you get to 2021, it’s a drag queen. That’s the locus of left-wing attention now.
Sohrab Ahmari was talking to Brendan O’Neill in the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-ep...-of-chaos/
https://www.salon.com/2021/07/26/fish-fr...e-iceberg/
EXCERPT: . . . Needless to say, it was alarming to read a report that a New York Times investigation into the sandwich's tuna found "no amplifiable tuna DNA," suggesting that the so-called tuna sandwich was not, in fact, tuna fish.
[...] Tuna isn't the only fish that has fraud problems. Oceana, a nonprofit ocean conservation group, began to investigate seafood fraud in 2011 and has since uncovered troubling patterns. In 2016 the group released a report about the worldwide scope of seafood fraud that detailed a pervasive, stomach-churning cheat of unsuspecting consumers. On average, one out of five of the more than 25,000 samples of seafood that they tested from 55 countries were mislabeled, with the trend occurring at every stage of the supply chain.
[...] So why is fish fraud prevalent? The answer boils down to lack of regulation, poor regulatory bodies, and the profit motive — in other words, capitalism behaving as usual. [NOTE: This is Salon's left political bias injecting itself into the issue.]
[...] "Another big challenge is something called trans-shipment at sea. Your average person would assume that a boat goes out, catches fish, and then comes back into port, sells those fish, and then goes back out, catches more fish. Instead, tuna vessels often handover their catch to another boat at sea and just keep fishing."
[...] "I'm very happy to see law enforcement getting involved," Larry Olmsted, author of "Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don't Know What You're Eating and What You Can Do about It," told Salon at the time. "Mislabeling is rampant in the seafood industry, and if you can't reliably get the fish you want in a port city like New York, just imagine what levels of fraud are like further inland. This business has had a fraud problem for years and years and the only people tracking it have been public interests groups."
Without regulation, us consumers may spend our lives worrying that the purveyors of succulent fish steaks, flavorful sushi rolls and moist crab cakes may be lying to us. That leaves us with a choice: take an informed risk, or avoid seafood altogether — even if that means, in my case, giving up on delicious Subway tuna hoagies... (MORE - details)
‘Lockdown is a class war by proxy’
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/07/27...-by-proxy/
EXCERPTS: . . . Sohrab Ahmari is op-ed editor at the New York Post and author of The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos. He joined Spiked’s editor for the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation...
Brendan O’Neill: One aspect of your book that really connects with me is the discussion of data against morality, or facts against truth. [...] How do you understand the emergence of this obsession with data, and how it relates to the diminishing role given to moral truth?
Sohrab Ahmari: Roughly 400 years ago, the modern scientific method emerged. Since then, it has yielded incredible discoveries about the physical workings of nature. Science is a very noble enterprise, and it deserves all the credit we can give it. The problem began when people attempted to impose the scientific way of understanding the world on everyone. This worldview holds that the only things that are truly knowable are these things we call facts, which we can generally express in mathematical language. Everything else [...] is provisional and subjective...
Scientists are now treated as the ultimate arbiters. With the vaccine, we have come close to conquering Covid. In my view, we have conquered it. Science has allowed us to do that. But when making decisions about the pandemic, we prioritised one way of knowing at the expense of all others. Politicians just gave up their brains to people like Anthony Fauci and Neil Ferguson.
Leaders should consider all sorts of things that Fauci or Ferguson can’t tell them about...
O’Neill: That problem is probably going to intensify. Over the past 18 months, scientists have become almost like philosopher-kings, telling us how to think and how to live...
One of the problems with this trend is that it reduces humankind to such an extraordinary degree. ... There is this incredibly reductionist view of human life...
Ahmari: CS Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man that if man wants to become a mere fact, he will. When we see humans as facts, they can be dehumanised. There is no longer anything special about them...
Having tasted what lockdowns can do, I’m very worried about them being applied to climate change. [...] For people like you and me, who can do much of our work from laptops, it works out too. It only really hurts working-class people. I’m not a Marxist. But the class dimension of this is undeniable, even for a conservative like me. A kind of class warfare by proxy is taking place, through the mechanisms of lockdowns, wokeness and climate change. Tensions between classes are getting mystified so our leaders don’t really deal with fundamental economic injustices.
O’Neill: One of the other paradoxes of the time we live in is that conservatives often seem to care more about working-class people than the left does. The left has abandoned economic concerns in favour of a culture war, hasn’t it?
Ahmari: There’s a funny Italian cartoon that shows the progression of the left-wing activist through the decades. In the 19th century, the point of concern for the left was the chimney-sweeping orphan boy in a Victorian town. Then, it was the industrial worker. But by the time you get to 2021, it’s a drag queen. That’s the locus of left-wing attention now.
Sohrab Ahmari was talking to Brendan O’Neill in the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-ep...-of-chaos/