Friday, August 22, 2008

Fish story on ice

The NYT on high schoolers' experiments showing that an extremely high proportion of a sample of fish sold in NYC was mislabeled. Though this is false advertising whether intentional or not, perhaps the most troubling legal angle is that the students, their parents, and their "academic mentor" all declined to reveal the sources from which the mislabeled fish were purchased "citing fear of lawsuits." Talk about a chilling effect. (I have a little more sympathy with the idea that it's not fair to name vendors when mislabeling can occur at any point in the process, but is it more fair to consumers to tell them they're eating one fish when they're actually eating another, with possibly a different safety profile and possibly endangered?)

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