Sushi and status-seeking

Here's a great story about how a couple of high school girls in Manhattan did DNA testing on sushi samples purchased in stores and restaurants, and found that consumers were often paying top-dollar for cheap imitations. Excerpt:

They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

Good for those girls. But it does raise an interesting question: if you can't taste the difference between white tuna and tilapia, why pay more for white tuna? I like sushi, but don't eat it often enough to discern the difference in a case like this. I know I like the taste of all kinds of tuna, and given how expensive sushi is, typically confine my order to the tuna family when I go to sushi restaurants. Still, they could serve me tilapia and I'd probably not be able to tell the difference.

Is this case akin to those experiments in which pranksters rent an expensive venue and display canvases painted by children as the work of Modernist painters, thus gaming gullible gallery-goers into rating child's play as serious art? I mean to say, to what extent is sushi-eating a matter of gustatory discernment, vs. status-seeking?