"Shrimp fraud" in Gulf Coast cities

 As reported by USA Today:

Restaurants throughout the Gulf Coast are serving imported shrimp but telling their customers they're feasting on fresh crustaceans fished in the Gulf of Mexico, a series of new studies found.

SeaD Consulting, a food safety technology company, tested shrimp from randomly chosen restaurants in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Biloxi, Mississippi; Galveston, Texas; and Tampa Bay, Florida. Researchers found a significant number of the restaurants were passing off their shrimp as locally sourced, even though they were grown on foreign farms and imported to the U.S.

The cities with the highest "shrimp fraud rate" were Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, Florida, at 96%, according to SeaD Consulting. Only two of the 44 restaurants sampled were serving authentic shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, a study found...

The consulting company behind the research says the rampant misrepresentation hurts not only customers – who are put at higher risk of consuming tainted food – but also harms local fishermen struggling to compete with the low cost of imported shrimp from countries like India, Vietnam and Ecuador...

Earlier this month, a new law went into effect in Louisiana requiring restaurants selling imported shrimp to include a notice on their menus telling customers the shrimp is imported and listing the country of origin. A similar law went into effect in Alabama in October.