Jackson Free Press

The online news outlet Daily Beast (known for its pithy re-writes of top stories and occasional forays into investigation) has done something a bit different over the weekend -- the site paid for a quick study of seafood from the Gulf of Mexico, enlisting a lab to test for oil and/or chemical dispersant contamination.

So is the caution among America's seafood consumers justified? Seeking a definitive answer to the question, The Daily Beast commissioned an independent lab, one of a handful certified to measure chemical dispersants, to analyze a cross-section of Gulf seafood—red grouper, jumbo shrimp, and crabmeat—for both oil and the dispersants that have prompted almost as much alarm as the petroleum itself. To further sharpen the test, we also performed similar tests on samples of those three types of seafood culled from the Atlantic Ocean.

Their result: Immaculate. As with the Atlantic samples, all of the Gulf seafood contained either undetectable or incredibly minute (well below everyday federal thresholds) levels of petroleum hydrocarbons or dispersants.

The stories notes that their samples were very random and very limited, but that they appear to give credence to the recent FDA reports that find similar non-contamination for Gulf seafood; however a recent survey shows that 54 percent of Americans distrust the safety of Gulf seafood.