Your Sushi Is Probably Fake. Here’s How to Tell, and What to Do About It. – Thrillist

Things can get dangerous

According to Real Food/Fake Food, “Consumers ordering white tuna get a completely different animal, no kind of tuna at all, 94 percent of the time.”

Yikes.

Not only that, but the fish they substitute for tuna, escolar, is commonly referred to as “Ex-Lax fish” in the seafood industry, for what need to be obvious reasons. If you are wondering why serving this diarrhea time-bomb is still legal… well, it isn’t in lots of countries (Japan notably one of them) and it was banned in America by the FDA in the early 1990s, only to be unbanned in 1998.

“So when people think they are sick because their tuna has actually gone bad, it’s way more likely they never even had tuna in the initial place,” Olmsted said. Though escolar-for-tuna may be the most widespread and particularly harmful instance, tilefish (on the FDA’s do-not-eat list for children and pregnant women) is often swapped for red snapper or halibut, and tilapia (which is admittedly less harmful, but still shitty) is swapped for tuna, too.