Originally published at: No tuna DNA found in Subway tuna subs, according to the New York Times | Boing Boing
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Pretty soon we’ll have to take our food down to the local street side tech shack to verify it’s vin number.
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DNA tests on a sandwich? That is beyond stupid
Why would the NYT bother with such obvious nonsense?
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ad revenue from the increase page views, and increased sales if people are still buying dead-tree versions of the paper.
But that’s the cynic in me.
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But did they check for dolphin?
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And testing labs that market on basis of doing that thing you’ve seen on CSI.
I really, really doubt you could get a clean enough sample out of a complete tuna salad sandwich. Especially when it’s collected by a reporter on a whim.
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If you bought a tuna fresh off the boat, cooked it to 155 F, shredded the meat, and mixed it up to make tuna salad, the resulting product also wouldn’t have any detectable tuna DNA.
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And nobody will read far enough into the article to see the caveats and likely explanations. It’s just more fodder for the viral mills of social media.
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Is this something that is possible or even probable? Are there other fish that end up in tuna cans, particularly cans of chunks of tuna rather than whole?
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I think the even more cynical explanation is that they don’t even care about any revenue impact.
The rottenness at the core of big media like the NY Times and CNN is that the management has become unconcerned with anything, really.
I think the constant refrain of some press critics that money is the driver is ultimately a fable that people tell themselves to keep a faint ember of hope alive – that if a story about bad people is juicy enough, they’ll run with it. I don’t think that’s true.
A classic case is the way the press swallowed Bill Barr’s lies about the Mueller Report hook, line and sinker. The juicy story would have been to prep like crazy for a likely result that Mueller was detailing a pattern of obstruction of justice, and once Barr lied, they’d have an even juicier story.
Instead, they played it as the wettest of blankets and went along with the effort to smother the fire. There’s a culture in newsrooms all over that “LOL nothing matters” and what we see is ultimately a reflection of that culture, even when it conflicts with opportunities to sell.
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Wait, you can get DNA results from cooked meat? I mean, asking for a friend…
I have been told that a LOT of crab meat isn’t crab meat, and that scallops are often something else too. I do not have proof of this, but I also wouldn’t be surprised. I am not enough of a connoisseur to really tell the difference on some things.
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You’re so right! Why should food quality be of any concern to a newspaper or the readers who consume food!
Well, yeah, it’s either that, or a “Sweeney Todd” scenario.
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Would a short-seller attempt to devalue a company by pushing a lawsuit like this?
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Weird that Subway gets so much flak for this.
You see, fake tuna is all over the place. (How To Tell If Your Tuna Is Real Or Fake | HuffPost Life old news too, nihil sub sōle novum…) In fact control in food supply lines is woefully lacking in general, remember the horsey lasagnas?
Take note: Many food processors don’t even know what SPECIES they are grinding up in your food. Never mind they care if these creatures were healthy, fit for consumption, treated humanely, or even organisms for that matter 
I am not defending Subway, I am just confused they are the only one blamed 
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I kinda wondered if they tested it to see if it is Mackerel, or if they just tested for tuna and left it to lurid imaginations. People are like “WHAT COULD IT POSSIBLY BE??” as of it were made of something disgusting. My guess would be it is simply a cheaper species of fish that the purveyor passed off as tuna.
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if all you have is a grinder, everything looks like a meat
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That’s then spread through once-niche tech blogs.
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There was no testable DNA at all, because the sample came from a cooked tuna salad sandwich. They couldn’t test if it was tuna, or mackerel, or a fish, or dinosaur meat or anything else.
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True, but I don’t think it’s common to have it deliberately mislabeled. “Imitation crab” is widespread because “fishy stuff with fishy texture and some orange bits for color” is basically all fine with people who like fish, whether it’s from a crab or a slurry made from the snouts and assholes of Alaskan pollock.
The funny thing about all this is, canned tuna is incredibly cheap. It’s the “USDA select ground chuck” of fish. If you wanted to adulterate your processed fish product, you’d probably use tuna to do it. The issue is whether what you’re getting is all tuna, or the occasional bits and bobs of some other marine creature by accident.
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Yes.
Escolar is often packaged as “White Tuna”
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