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    "headline": "Chilean sea bass is not a bass: a US fish wholesaler invented the name in 1977 to sell Patagonian toothfish",
    "description": "Lee Lantz weighed \"Pacific sea bass\" and \"South American sea bass\" before choosing the name. US regulators accepted it in 1994, and every frozen import now needs federal pre-approval.",
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    "keywords": "Chilean sea bass, food names, Patagonian toothfish, seafood, strange but true",
    "articleBody": "Chilean sea bass is not a bass, and plenty of it has never been near Chile. An American fish wholesaler named Lee Lantz made the name up in 1977 because the animal’s real one, Patagonian toothfish, was never going to sell. That bit of menu history resurfaced on November 5 in a post on Reddit’s Today I Learned forum. The post had it right, down to the two names Lantz tried and dropped first: “Pacific sea bass” and “South American sea bass.” The fish behind the label The Patagonian toothfish, Dissostichus eleginoides, is a notothen, a cold-water fish that does not belong to the sea bass family at all. Swedish zoologist Fredrik Adam Smitt formally described it in 1898 from Puerto Toro, on the Chilean side of Tierra del Fuego. It is built for the deep. The species lives in water of 1 to 4°C (34 to 39°F), at depths from 45 to 3,850 meters, around seamounts and sub-Antarctic islands in the southern Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. A typical commercially caught fish weighs 7 to 10 kg (15 to 22 lb). Big adults can top 100 kg, stretch to 2.3 meters and are thought to live as long as 50 years. How “toothfish” became “sea bass” Accounts differ on whether Lantz first met the fish in a Chilean port town or in shipments arriving from Chile. They agree on what he noticed: white, oily flesh with a mild flavor that is hard to overcook. What he could not sell was the word “toothfish.” By one telling, “Chilean” nodded to where the catch was coming from, and “bass” borrowed the reputation of a fish American diners already trusted. Regulators took far longer to come around. The US Food and Drug Administration accepted “Chilean sea bass” as an alternative market name for Patagonian toothfish in 1994, which is 17 years after Lantz coined it (1994 − 1977 = 17). Some retellings have the name going to the agency in 1977; the acceptance itself is dated 1994. The label has stretched since then. A close relative, the Antarctic toothfish, is also sold as Chilean sea bass, and the US fisheries agency NOAA uses the name for both species. Elsewhere the same fish answers to “toothfish” or “icefish” in the UK, to “mero,” and to a type of cod in Singapore. The price of a good name The rebrand worked too well. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing nearly collapsed some toothfish fisheries in the Southern Ocean. The figures show both the damage and the recovery. Illegal catches were estimated at 32,000 tonnes in 1997, with about 55 vessels at work. By 2010 the estimate was 1,615 tonnes and four vessels. That is a fall of 30,385 tonnes, or about 95 percent (30,385 ÷ 32,000 = 0.9495). Paperwork did much of the job. The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, the body responsible for marine life in Antarctic waters, launched a catch documentation scheme in 2000 that follows toothfish from the dock to the final sale. The legal global catch now runs at around 30,000 tonnes, and about half of it comes from fisheries certified by the Marine Stewardship Council. Reading the menu today “Chilean sea bass” in the US or Canada can be Patagonian or Antarctic toothfish. It may have been caught off Chile or Argentina, or around the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, the French Kerguelen and Crozet islands, or Australia’s Heard and Macquarie islands. Fisheries at South Georgia, the Ross Sea, Heard Island, Macquarie Island, Kerguelen, Crozet and the Falklands hold Marine Stewardship Council certification. Getting it into the United States takes more than a catchy name. NOAA Fisheries requires an International Fisheries Trade Permit for anyone importing toothfish, and every frozen shipment needs its catch documents pre-approved: $200 per application, filed 10 working days before the fish arrives. Further reading Wikipedia: Patagonian toothfish NOAA Fisheries: Importing and exporting Antarctic marine living resources Image: Francis Letourmy, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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