Smell tests not passing smell test

WVUE: Gulf seafood declared safe; fishermen not so sure

Some are turning up their noses at the smell tests - in which inspectors sniff seafood for chemical odors - and are demanding more thorough testing to reassure the buying public about the effects of the oil and the dispersants used to fight the slick.

"If I put fish in a barrel of water and poured oil and Dove detergent over that, and mixed it up, would you eat that fish?" asked Rusty Graybill, an oysterman and shrimp and crab fisherman from Louisiana's St. Bernard Parish. "I wouldn't feed it to you or my family. I'm afraid someone's going to get sick."

Back in June when we pointed to this AP article describing the federal seafood taint-sniffing program we were struck by just how fly-by-night and, frankly, bullshitty the whole thing seemed. Here again is the key quote from that article.

The first line of defense began with closing a third of federal waters to fishing and hundreds more square-miles of state waters. Now comes the nose.

Mahan is an agricultural extension director with the University of Florida based in Apalachicola, where some of the world's most famous oysters are culled.

"We're being trained to detect different levels of taint, which in this case is oil," Mahan said last week. "We started out sniffing different samples of oil to sort of train our noses and minds to recognize it."

So what does an oily fish smell like?

"Well, it has an oil odor to it," Mahan said. "Everyone has a nose they bring to it ... Everybody's nose works differently. For me, the oysters are a little more challenging."

Novice inspectors being trained to execute a highly subjective test didn't inspire a great deal of confidence at the time. It was hoped, however, that this was a necessity born of desperate circumstances and that a more reliable testing process would be implemented by the time officials began to consider reopening fisheries. And so now that we've reached that point in time, let's look again at the much more sophisiticated scientific basis on which those decisions are being made.

In Mississippi on Monday, FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg said the government is "confident all appropriate steps have been taken to ensure that seafood harvested from the waters being opened today is safe and that Gulf seafood lovers everywhere can be confident eating and enjoying the fish and shrimp that will be coming out of this area."

Similarly, BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said Sunday that authorities "wouldn't open these waters ... if it wasn't safe to eat the fish." He said he would eat Gulf seafood and "serve it to my family."

Experts say smell tests may sound silly but are a proven technique that saves time and money. Moreover, they are the only way to check fish for chemical dispersants, though FDA spokeswoman Meghan Scott said government scientists are developing a tissue test. It is not clear when it will be ready.

Wait a minute. The FDA commissioner is "confident", Doug Suttles says he and his family "would" eat Gulf seafood themselves. And yet, all they have to go on is a testing method that... well we know that it "saves time and money" at least. This is crazy, right? Some people still think so.

Kevin Kleinow, a professor of aquatic toxicology, said he is laying off Gulf seafood until the government releases more specifics about the testing it conducted, including exactly what species are being monitored and what levels of toxic substances are being found.

He said he is also concerned that a smell test won't sniff out dispersants. "Some of them - we've done work on a number of surfactants that are used in dispersants - have very little odor," he said.

In Sunday's post, we pointed out that Governor Jindal and Mayor Landrieu have already demonstrated a preference for comfortable lies that protect business interests close to them over factual information about public safety. The ridiculous photo of the Mayor featured in that post is the result of his gleeful participation in the latest of a seemingly endless string of for-profit cause-poseur vapid art schemes that continually infect post-Katrina New Orleans with the "positivity" at the expense of honesty vibe that Mitch and many others have latched onto.

I suppose by now we're all well accustomed to these. Outbreaks like this really are the herpes of social media. They are quickly passed among the pretty people, thrive on a culture of attention-desperate self-gratification, and often involve a fair amount of prostitution. I don't mean to spend too much time picking on Dear New Orleans. Suffice to say, someone has figured out a way to promote a photography business by exploiting the intersection of current events and the need certain types of people have to be seen taking themselves very seriously. I only bring it up to point out that the Mayor is certainly one of those types of person.

But like it or not, this kind of borrowing civic concern to package a commercial or institutional message via individual narcissism is becoming more and more of the norm in mass communications. Which is exactly why Pepsi is so proud of its "Refresh the Gulf" initiative since it hits every one of those sweet spots. And this is why, we aren't surprised to see Dear New Orleans among the applicants proposing to spend $5,000 of Pepsi money writing on and then photographing Louisiana fishermen for the purposes of... well I'm not sure. Anyway, I'm sorry to say I probably won't be voting for that one. At least not when the competition is this stiff.

SEAFOOD COOKING CLASSES FOR THE GULF


Goals

* To raise awareness about the Gulf effort through classes and PR.
* To attract 60 persons to each class.
* Raise funds for the Gulf effort.

Turns out, these classes will be "raising awareness" in Chicago which is nice because we know how much the folks up there love their Gulf Lobster. On the other hand, it may have been a better idea to actually conduct the sessions in the coastal communities themselves. We hear the home cooks there are doing wonderful things with Dove detergent these days. You can almost smell it now.