The Boston Globe went to the International Barcode of Life for help testing fish served in local restaurants and grocery stores. The results were stomach turning and infuriating.

The sliver of raw fish sold as white tuna at Skipjack’s in Foxborough was actually escolar, an oily, cheaper species banned in Japan because it can make people sick.

The Alaskan butterfish at celebrity chef Ming Tsai’s Blue Ginger in Wellesley was really sablefish, traditionally a staple at Jewish delicatessens, not upscale dining establishments.

At Chau Chow Seafood Restaurant in Dorchester, the $23 flounder fillet turned out to be a Vietnamese catfish known as swai – nutritionally inferior and often priced under $4 a pound.

Those were among the findings of a five-month Globe investigation into the mislabeling of fish. It showed that Massachusetts consumers routinely and unwittingly overpay for less desirable, sometimes undesirable, species – or buy seafood that is simply not what it is advertised to be. In many cases, the fish was caught thousands of miles away and frozen, not hauled in by local fishermen, as the menu claimed. It may be perfectly palatable – just not what the customer ordered. But sometimes mislabeled seafood can cause allergic reactions, violate dietary restrictions, or contain chemicals banned in the United States.

Here’s more on the Ontario-based DNA Barcoding project that the paper employed to get the story:

As the technology to read DNA continues to improve, we move closer to a world in which the identification of species, and access to information on their biology, ecology, and socio-economic significance, can be provided with all the ease of scanning soup cans at the supermarket check-out. DNA barcoding aims to realize that world.

Achieving this goal requires increased involvement of the global community. As of early 2008, more than 100 outstanding researchers from 25 nations have indicated their support for a large-scale project focused on the construction of a comprehensive DNA barcode library for eukaryotic life. The first phase of the International Barcode of Life (iBOL, www.dnabarcoding.org) Project is envisaged as a five-year project, jointly administered by a consortium of funders and research groups, which will lead to the acquisition of DNA barcode records for 5M specimens, representing 500K species.