"Would you like flies with that?" Seafood raised on pig feces
and crawling with flies is being sold to U.S. consumers, according to a new
report.
The November issue of Bloomberg
Markets magazine, in a piece on food poisoning and safety, says that it is
common practice in some parts of Asia to feed fish pig waste. It describes, for
example, the sanitary conditions at a fish factory on the southern coast of
Vietnam. "Flies," it says, "crawl over baskets of processed
shrimp."
The shrimp at some plants are
packed in ice. That's good. What's bad: it's ice made from water often found to
be contaminated with bacteria and unfit for human consumption, say Bloomberg's
reporters in Hanoi.
Vietnam ships 100 million pounds
of shrimp a year to the U.S., about 8 percent of the shrimp sold in America.
Reuters says the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration in June recommended removal from the U.S. market of South
Korean shellfish, including clams and mussels, because, said the agency, the
fish might have been exposed to human fecal waste or otherwise contaminated. At
least 4 U.S. consumers have become ill after eating South Korean seafood, said
the FDA.
Outside Hong Kong, at a tilapia
farm, fish are fed a diet that includes pig and geese feces. That practice,
Michael Doyle tells Bloomberg Markets, is unsafe for U.S. consumers, because
the manure may be contaminated with salmonella. Doyle is director of the Center
for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. Fish farmers, he says, use fecal
matter as a cheaper alternative to commercial fish food.
The FDA inspects food shipments
to the United States, including seafood shipments, but the agency's resources
are limited, says Bloomberg's report. It is able to inspect fewer than 3
percent of shipments. Of that, reports Bloomberg, much is sent back. The FDA
has rejected 1,380 shipments of Vietnamese seafood since 2007, finding filth
and salmonella.
Kevin Fitzsimmons, a professor
and research scientist at the University of Arizona College of Agriculture and
Life Sciences, tells ABC News he has read the Bloomberg article and finds it
"a little misleading. I do a lot of work in Asia and am headed there now
for a conference on tilapia. They [Bloomberg] are cherry-picking a few items to
make things sound as bad as possible." Fitzsimmons is an officer of the
American Tilapia Association and an expert on seafood production in Asia.
For starters, he says, seafood
shipments from Asia to the U.S. number in the "hundreds of thousands, if
not millions," so the fact that 1,380 from Vietnam have been returned
since 2007 is relatively insignificant.
Second, he says, the practice in
Asia of putting hog feces into fish ponds dates back "thousands of
years," and is not as repellent as it at first might sound. Why?
"Because the fish are not eating the feces. The feces are added to the
water to produce an algae bloom," he says, which in turn produces a form
of plankton that the fish then eat.
ALAN FARNHAM
No comments:
Post a Comment