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Jaws the book (1974) claimed that if you use a cookie cutter to punch holes from flounder wings, you can create fake scallops and that these are commonly sold in restaurants:

'I was just looking at the scallops, or what they claim are scallops. The chances are they're flounder, cut up with a cookie cutter.' [...] Hooper's scallops were the size of marshmallows. 'Flounder,' he said after the waitress had left. 'I should have known.'

This meme appears to live on to this day, although often the fake species is said to be stingray (skate) instead.

Are there any documented cases of this happening?

lambshaanxy
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  • Looks unlikely: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-09-29/entertainment/9409290143_1_sea-scallops-pickle-packers-international-vlasic – lambshaanxy Aug 10 '17 at 20:33
  • Coincidentally, an old surfer from the sixties told me exactly this just a week ago. Apparently, it's an old urban legend. But we'll see how much is legend and how much is truth. –  Aug 10 '17 at 22:58
  • I haven't heard of fake scallops. I have heard of "Krab" used in place of "Crab", where "Krab" is whatever they want, and with that spelling is not a mis-labeling... – GEdgar Aug 11 '17 at 00:13
  • @jpatokal: Would you like to turn that into an answer, please? – Oddthinking Aug 11 '17 at 02:34
  • I could have sworn we had a related question about other seafood substitutions, but I can't find it. – Oddthinking Aug 11 '17 at 02:35
  • @Oddthinking I think that there was one about how some restaurant was selling lobster or lobster rolls for less than $15, and the asker wanted to know if it was real lobster or not. I think that the question received criticism for being specific to a restaurant, and possibly since the question didn't establish whether or not they were necessarily claiming that the lobster was "real". I don't see it, either. Guessing that it may've been deleted? – Nat Aug 11 '17 at 05:46
  • "[Surimi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surimi)", Wikipedia: **"_In the West, surimi products usually are imitation seafood products, such as crab, abalone, shrimp, calamari, and scallop._"** – Nat Aug 11 '17 at 05:50
  • @Nat I used to live in Japan, so I've eaten a lot of surimi, but I've never seen any that would come even close to the texture. Also, the legend is specifically about fake scallops being passed off as real ones. – lambshaanxy Aug 11 '17 at 07:50
  • So are you asking about if restaurants have been known to serve imitation scallops without explicitly labeling them as such, or if these imitation scallops are of sufficiently high quality that they could fool discerning customers? – Nat Aug 11 '17 at 08:12
  • @Nat I'm asking if there are *any* documented cases of fake scallops being sold as real scallops, whether it's wholesale, retail, restaurants, etc. – lambshaanxy Aug 11 '17 at 10:53
  • Scallop and flounder have very different tastes, and very different textures. It would not fool anyone who'd ever had scallops before, and would be easy to prove. I don't know about rays, but flounder simply isn't plausible, unless you're selling it to people who have no idea what to expect. – Ben Barden Aug 11 '17 at 13:32

1 Answers1

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In short, this looks unlikely. This article in the Chicago Tribune dates from 1994, but it states that:

  • The National Fisheries Institute is not aware of any cases of intentionally mislabeling "any of the five species of scallops that are commercially harvested from American waters"
  • The Food and Drug Administration's Office of Seafood has "not seen evidence of mislabeling".

The FDA spokesperson also noted that "the muscle fibers (of the scallop and the ray) would not look the same. It's not worth the labor involved".

The one common scallop "scam" is to pump them up with water, which increases the weight by 25% and makes them soft and flabby... but they're still actual scallops.

lambshaanxy
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