Louisiana bill would require country of origin labeling on restaurant menus

Seafood that is sold at grocery stores is subject to federal country-of-origin labeling laws. That same transparency has yet to be extended to restaurants. A bill requiring Louisiana restaurants to label menus with the origins of shrimp and crawfish is winding its way through the state legislature. If passed, the law would be a huge win for Louisiana’s commercial fishing industry, which has been advocating for such a requirement for over a decade. The idea is that diners in Louisiana, when given the choice, would rather eat locally harvested seafood than the imported variety. And without a rule that mandates origin labeling, there’s a lot of room for murky menu language. For example, seafood billed as “Cajun” suggests that it was harvested off the state’s coast. But the term isn’t regulated by any governing agency and could easily refer to a style of cooking—with no guarantee about sourcing.“If tourists that come into Louisiana are biting into a shrimp po’ boy—in their mind, do they think they’re eating imported shrimp or do they think they’re eating shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico?” asked state representative and sponsor of the bill Jerry Gisclair, rhetorically. “Obviously they’re thinking they’re eating fresh Louisiana Gulf shrimp.”