About That Crab Cake. . .

Crabcake fraud: New report finds 38 percent are mislabeled in Chesapeake Bay restaurants - Fraud rate higher in Annapolis, Baltimore; lowest on Eastern Shore

Blue crab, the Chesapeake Bay’s most iconic edible species, also appears to be its most impersonated on menus in the region that say they’re selling local seafood.

A report released today by the conservation nonprofit Oceana found that 38 percent of crab cakes labeled as local were comprised of an entirely different species of crab, predominantly imported from the Indo-Pacific region. In Annapolis and Baltimore, nearly 50 percent of “Maryland” or “Chesapeake Bay” crab cakes were mislabeled.

After releasing seafood fraud reports that found similar levels of mislabeling among certain fish and shrimp, DC-based Oceana decided to tackle a beloved species that's close to home.

Their team used DNA analysis to determine the species used in 90 crab cakes sourced from restaurants across the region, mostly during August and September 2014.

“I’ve put a lot of seafood in my purse over the last few years,” said Dr. Kimberly Warner, author of the report and a senior scientist at Oceana who’s lived in the Chesapeake Bay region for years. The samples she and other testers collected were shipped to a lab in Florida that determined whether the cakes contained blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, and, if not, which species were used instead.

Warner said the fraud rate of 38 percent is a conservative estimate, because the DNA testing couldn’t confirm the geographical origin of the blue crab and whether it was from Maryland or the Chesapeake Bay. The same species of blue crabs is also caught as far north as Canada and south as Argentina.

“So all we could say is, ‘Yes, it’s blue crab,’ but not, ‘Yes, it came from the Chesapeake Bay,’” Warner said.

It's interesting that there's so much fraud in Baltimore and Annapolis, where the relatively ignorant urban consumers are easy to defraud. And frankly, it doesn't matter much because they're getting what they ordered, crab. And it can be very difficult to tell the difference between very similar species. Sapidus isn't the only swimming crab, only the one that's familiar to us in Maryland.

If you really want Maryland Blue Crab, catch your own, steam and pick the crab or at least buy them at a roadside crab merchant who likely gets them from the local watermen instead of the Vietnamese.