Subway is doubling down on its claims that the tuna salad on its menu comes from 100% tuna–despite a New York Times lab testing that found “no amplifiable tuna DNA” in the stuff. Forget the chicken sandwich wars, the tuna sandwich wars are heating up!
ICYMI, Subway is in a bitter legal battle to defend their seafood name in California. Two plaintiffs in a class-action case, Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin, claim that they have “been deceived and suffered economic injury” because the tuna on the sandwich chain’s menu *does not* contain tuna sourced from fisheries “with non-threatened stock levels,” such as skipjack and yellowfin tuna, like its website claims. The lawsuit alleges that it actually is made up of a “mixture of various concoctions.” (Editor’s note: what does that even mean?!)
Flash forward to last week, when the NYT published a piece called “The Big Tuna Sandwich Mystery,” in which they conducted a lab test of 60 inches of Subway tuna sandwiches purchased at three Los Angeles restaurant locations. The paper claims that the lab was unable to identify any five tuna species it tested for. Eep!
Now, before you start jumping to conclusions (and getting your tuna salad elsewhere, or even better, going vegan), the paper had one big caveat with the results: tuna DNA may not even be something you can test for. Twist!
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"Once tuna has been cooked, its DNA becomes denatured — meaning that the fish’s characteristic properties have likely been destroyed, making it difficult, if not impossible, to identify," the paper acknowledged.
A Subway spokesperson denied the lab results. In an email to TODAY, the food chain rep said, "Just like the original claim, the new claims are untrue and have absolutely no merit." They added, "All (the test) says is that the testing could not confirm tuna, which is what one would expect from a DNA test of denatured proteins." Natch!
The lab where the NYT reporting could only explain their results as such: either it's so "heavily processed that whatever we could pull out, we couldn’t make an identification. Or we got some and there’s just nothing there that’s tuna." Well, we already know that there is a ton of mayo mixed in (at least according to employees), its frozen and then shipped across the country, so it may be difficult to know the truth until the judge weighs in. The saga continues!
