Question: What is in a lobster and shrimp pasta meal? Kudos if you said lobster, shrimp and pasta. If you also said olive oil and seasoning, you’re probably still on the right track. But what if you also threw in crawfish, pollock and cod. What would you call that?

Anita Bolan found out she was allergic to crawfish a decade ago when she first ate the crustacean. In 2002, she visited a Red Lobster in the Atlanta, Ga. area and ordered their lobster and shrimp pasta dish. Soon after, she suffered an allergic reaction.

“I just get real sick,” she told The Wave. “I break out in hives, I itch and get severe diarrhea.”

She contacted the Red Lobster corporate offices in Orlando, Fla. to complain about her meal. That’s when she was first told that the dish also contains crawfish.

Bolan said a regional manager “told me that crawfish was a form of lobster and so they can put it in the lobster dish; that it was legal for them to do that.”

Once bitten, twice shy The matter was essentially over for Bolan. That is until June, when she visited a Red Lobster in the Long Island town of Valley Green, N.Y., not far from her home in Far Rockaway in Queens.

She wanted to order the lobster and shrimp nachos and “specifically asked them not to put [crawfish] in there, and they said they wouldn’t.”

But she got sick again. She called the manager and he, again, confirmed crawfish was in the meal and apologized for not getting her order right by excluding the crustacean.

Bolan said when she sees the word “lobster” on the company’s menu it’s supposed to conjure up images like that of the cooked-red crustacean perched up on the company’s banner, a graphic visibly apparent in several places on the menu.

“Not crawfish,” she admonished. “If it was listed as a seafood pasta then it would be different and then you could ask, ‘What’s in the seafood pasta?’ but if the menu says ‘shrimp and lobster’ it should be ‘shrimp and lobster’.”

Legal action? Bolan said she never considered taking legal action against the restaurant chain. Still, after both incidents, perhaps as a matter of policy, Bolan said Red Lobster’s insurance liability carrier phoned her “to see if I went to the emergency room or had any intention of doing so.”

“I knew that if I did not go to the emergency room or got deathly ill then it wouldn’t be worth trying to pursue legal action because they’re a big company,” she said, adding, “unless I would have died.”

But she didn’t go to the emergency room instead opting for allergy medication, Benadryl.

She did reiterate to the insurance carrier her request made to the manager at the store that “I want them to tell people that they’re not serving just lobster.”

“I thought this time they would do something about it and they didn’t,” she said. That’s when she emailed CBS News to tell them her story, one now being told around the country.

Red Lobster and Darden Restaurant Inc. executives and spokespersons have refused to talk to The Wave for this article despite repeated daily attempts to obtain a comment since late last month.

Far-flung tale gets alterations The original CBS News report broadcast on Sept. 27 for the New York market has since made its way onto the lineup of other CBS News affiliates in Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco.

Interestingly, the original text has been modified in subsequent re-publications on the Internet. For instance, in the original story, Red Lobster’s vice president of marketing said crawfish was the only species added to the seafood combo meals not printed on the menu.

However, CBS News reporter Kirstin Cole told The Wave that after the interview with Mills she received an e-mail from the company’s director of communications admitting that cod and pollock are also added to five menu items and not listed on the menu. Those menu items are, according to the report: lobster and shrimp nachos, artichoke lobster dip, lobster and crab stuffed mushrooms and lobster and shrimp pasta.

A subsequent publication of the original story, after The Wave had already talked to Cole, read: “Red Lobster sent us a statement today indicating that cod and pollock may be added to the "Lobster and Crabmeat Stuffed Mushroom" appetizer.”

In the original publication, CBS reported that Red Lobster would not say how much crawfish is in the dish, “explaining it's part of a secret recipe” and offered no assurances that it was considering changing its menu because of Bolan’s experience.

However, the subsequent article published read: “Red Lobster says that sometimes crawfish amounts to less than one ounce of a dish. But it is now looking into revising the menu for its five combination dishes, probably to say “contains crawfish when available.”

The dangers of seafood allergies According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the most common foods to cause allergic reactions in adults are shellfish such as shrimp, crayfish, lobster, and crab, followed by peanuts, fish, and eggs. Some of these foods can cause severe anaphylaxis, a sudden drop in blood pressure that can be fatal if not treated quickly

Dr. Scott Sicherer of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, an expert allergist, told The Wave that while it is more common to be allergic to many types of shellfish rather than one, it does happen.

“When someone has an allergy to any food they need a clear line of communication with the restaurant and the restaurant needs a clear line of communication to the person about the safety of the meal they are providing,” Sicherer said.

Does FDA have a role? Faye Feldstein works for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Division of Cooperative Programs. She deals with food allergen policies for the agency. One of the federal laws the FDA operates under is the authority of the Public Health Service Act. Under those guidelines, FDA provides guidance, support, training and expertise to the nation’s restaurants in the form of the FDA’s Model Food Code, updated every two years.

To help devise standard updates to the code, the FDA works with a group called Conference for Food Protection, a body composed of food industry stakeholders including consumer groups, state and local health representatives, industry groups, and federal government types like FDA representatives.

The conference meets every two years to discuss and update science and standards related to the provision. While the states can vote on initiatives, the FDA retains ultimate authority over food policies in the United States.

At the end of the conference’s meeting in 2002, an allergen committee was formed to provide the conference with certain recommendations at the next biennial meeting regarding how to deal with food issues related to food allergens at retail and foodservice establishments. Reaching out to industry, consumers ... but not just yet The recommendations were offered at the last conference meeting in April. They included defining what a food allergen actually is and explaining the significance of food allergies and allergic reactions to retail and foodservice establishments.

“Those recommendations were accepted at the meeting this year and the conference is currently working on those changes for 2005,” Feldstein said.

The allergen committee was also continued and given a further two-year charge to develop state and local training programs and the establishment of resource sheets for use by industry and consumers.

The committee will report its findings and results to the conference at its 2006 meeting.

Feldstein said while there may be some specific state regulations that go further than FDA permits, she doesn’t know any state regulations that are specific to menus.

Allergies, schmallergies: It's the money, stupid But Bolan said while the allergic reaction she suffered was quite unpleasant it “was not the point.”

She said CBS “took away the heat [on Red Lobster] by paying more attention to the allergy part of the story and not dealing with the issue of robbing the consumer.”

“It’s not about because I was allergic to the [crawfish], but that you’re actually paying for something you’re not getting,” she said. “You’re spending your money, you should know what you’re getting, but if you’re not allergic to it or you’re not keen to what they are doing, you would never know. [Red Lobster] leaves out crawfish because they don’t want consumers to know that they’re not just getting lobster.”

When is a crawfish a lobster? And what about the statement to Bolan by a Red Lobster regional manager that “crawfish was a form of lobster.”

Dan Schick, a biologist at the Maine Department of Marine Resources, told The Wave that the crayfish is essentially a decapod crustacean. That means it belongs to the same order as lobster, having five pairs of appendages joined to a segment of its thorax. Shrimp and crabs also belong to this order.

Schick said “you have a ways to go on the family trees before you get down to the actual animal.”

“The New England lobster is not all that closely related to crayfish,” he said. “I think Red Lobster is treading on thin ice with this one.”

According to the FDA’s "Seafood List," there are three species -- Panulirus ornatus, Panulirus regius and Panulirus versicolor -- whose market name, spiny lobster, has a vernacular name of crawfish. The list is a compilation of existing acceptable market names for imported and domestically available seafood in the United States.

But Spring Randolph, a consumer safety officer for the FDA’s Center For Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said the agency frowns on the use of the vernacular name.

“We discourage the use of vernacular names, because not all the listed vernacular names are acceptable market names, and the use of these names may cause a product to be misbranded,” she wrote to The Wave in an e-mail.

She confirmed that freshwater crawfish, American and European lobsters and lobsterettes are grouped by scientists as types of clawed lobster. But the similarities stop there.

“Commercially, each of these three groups are substantially different," she said. "Freshwater animals are in no respect comparable or substitutable in the marketplace for other clawed lobsters and they are not so regarded. [FDA] would not support species substitution. It would be misleading to consumers.”

But while FDA may not support the practice it certainly can’t do anything about it. “When you stop and think about the number of retail outlets that are selling food and for which there is a legitimate food safety issue -- and that would include virtually every restaurant and grocery store in the country -- you’re now in the hundreds of thousands of outlets,” Phil Spiller, director of the FDA’s Office of Seafood, told The Wave.

“[FDA does] not typically intervene as a regulator, we leave restaurants and grocery stores primarily to state and local regulatory authorities. I’m not sure that the taxpayers are prepared to pay what it would cost at the federal level in federal taxes to have a significant federal investigative force to be able to go into local retail outlets like that.”

Spiller could not quantify the amount of fraud taking place in the seafood industry but also said there are no FDA resources dedicated to economic fraud in the seafood industry.

No money to combat fraud “I’m not going to say that FDA would never, under any circumstance, pursue an economic fraud issue but, overwhelmingly, we have to prioritize our resources toward safety issues,” he said.

So, what difference would it make if the “lobster and shrimp” pasta dish had 99 percent crawfish or 2 percent crawfish?

“At 2 percent? I don’t know. There are a lot of things that go into casseroles and pasta dishes in addition to the main ingredient, as any chef would know,” he said. “Hypothetically, if you got to 99 percent crawfish you might be able to make a good case. Hypothetically, at 99 percent, you’re probably within that range, especially if the consumer has no idea.”

Asked what range he’s referring to or what a “good case” meant, Spiller declined to elaborate.

“I can’t address that because I don’t know the specific incident,” he said. “I can tell you that it would be a rare event, if at all, that the FDA would intervene in a local restaurant kind of a situation.”

'Every restaurant is local' - FDA's Phil Spiller He said local authorities would be the best source for answers on economic enforcement at the restaurant level.

A Nassau County Health Department official did conduct an inspection of the Red Lobster unit in Valley Stream, N.Y., where Bolan’s June experience occurred.

However, the official would not comment on the case and required The Wave to submit an application to obtain a copy of the inspection, which was faxed to the department Wednesday. No response was received.

Bolan said the Nassau County Health Department concluded its investigation declaring “no rules were broken” by not listing crawfish on the menu because restaurants do not have to list all the ingredients of a menu item.

No substitution, no foul “They can call it a lobster dish as long as they put some lobster in it, even if they put other things in it,” Bolan said she was told by the health official. “It’s not that they were substituting because lobster was part of the dish.”

CBS News reporter Cole confirmed to The Wave that Red Lobster’s vice president of marketing, Ken Mills, assured her that what they're doing is not substituting crawfish for lobster or shrimp.

"What we do is add crawfish to the seafood combination plates because they add flavor, they add texture. So in our minds, we're adding value to those dishes," Mills said, according to Cole’s report.

Meanwhile, Bolan now asks any seafood restaurant she visits whether they crawfish is an ingredient not listed on the menu.

“If it’s something stuffed with shrimp I would ask, ‘Do you also put crawfish in it?’ because now I’m not sure how many restaurants are doing that," she said. "And the [wait staff] look at me funny and say, ‘No, this is what it says and this is what it is,’ and they get offended. But at Red Lobster you have to ask because that’s what their practice is. Other places, they don’t do that.”

Red Lobster adds crawfish, confusion to its lobster menu items