Yes. DNA starts to degrade at about 125F and degrades completely by about 190F.
And welcome to BoingBoing!
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That’s so nice you’ve noticed I’m new here! Thank you, I feel welcomed!
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First thing, monkfish isn’t cheap nowadays unfortunately(absolutely love it grilled on charcoal), and I actually had a friend on a message board in the early 00’s who grew up in New England in the earlier part of the century, who said that he used to get made fun of at school for having a lobster as his lunch… as supposedly it was poor people’s food at that time? Weird how these things change.
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The preparation for a classic Tuna Melt (based on the Nieman Marcus Tea Room) starts with: “Denature the Deoxyribonucleic-Acid”
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Thanks for providing this information, honestly I tried googling whether we should see DNA in the subs and got a confusing mass of studies on differing but closely related subjects that I would have had to scour for a long time to find this.
I assume that subway significantly overcooks their tuna as well because: 1. They are liability-minded; 2. Overcooking fish basically makes it dry which doesn’t matter much when you are mixing it with a disturbing amount of mayonaisse.
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Which would be why the myth has fallen out of fashion. It’s only really been since the 00’s that Monkfish has become a desirable fish.
Straight through the 90’s fisherman here used to pot them, sell the liver to Japanese buyers and either take the fish home to eat themselves or discard it. T
They were used as bait in lobster pots by fisherman who couldn’t afford preferable baits.
The period where lobster was poor people food was mostly in the 18th and 19th century. Pre railroad.
It’s pricey reputation largely comes after it became possible to ship it live, inland. And was mostly driven by those off the shore areas.
But that reputation really never took hold in places with fisheries. Lobster has usually been pretty damn affordable anywhere you’re catching it. So like straight up to the 80’s it was common for like fishermen’s kids to bring lobster sandwiches to school. Cause it was basically free.
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Yeah, that makes sense but I wish it was the case here, they catch crabs and the occasional lobster here, maybe they’re just not common enough to drive down the price.
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Or, as they put it “it’s so heavily processed that whatever we could pull out, we couldn’t make an identification.”
They make cooking sound disgusting.
Enhance!
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Calamari or hog bung?
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It just goes to show that you can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish.
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I mean there’s never really been much of a fishery much South of Jersey. And the fisheries from there through southern Mass have basically collapsed.
Our local lobster here is like 2 or 3 times the price of Maine and Canadian lobster these days. It’s not the $20/lb pricing you see inland, but it’s a lot more than I’m used to at $12 or $14/lb.
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NYT buried the lead - “no tuna DNA found in can of tuna”
Yeah, I live in a portside town, and the fishermean still land here, but they pretty much sell 90% of their stuff to resellers, so there’s not much to pick up for fisherman’s prices… I do miss italy for that, you caould get up at 6, wander down to the port and find all sorts of things, mantis shrimp, sole, squid and cuttlefish, gurnard…
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Well, that was horrific-ish, lol. I have to say though, if marketed as what it really is, sounds like less food waste to me. We have mountain oysters, why not mountain calamari?
And hey, I now have a post-apocalyptic source of faux-calamari, though, so I call it a win overall. Thanks!
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Agreed. When I heard that story, my main beef was that it seems like restaurants aren’t honest on the menu. But it sounded like the “fake” stuff tasted better, and like you infer, it’s a part that otherwise might not get used. I mean, we’re gonna keep eating bacon, so there’s always going to be pig bung, might as well use it, right?
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But the answer to this is quite simple: take a couple different canned tuna, cook them and prep them, then submit both cooked and uncooked sample to look for tuna DNA.
Do Subway ship their tuna stuff to stores raw? Or cooked/processed? I suspect the latter. So if it’s about the same process as canned tuna, then testing regular canned tuna should give us some data.
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Everything IS meat.
Yeah we have a few people who still sell direct, but it’s more out of tradition than a regular thing. At least we have fish markets that are part of the distribution chain and specialize in local products. So most of what they sell is direct off the boat.
The Long Island Sound lobster fishery is just a roving disaster though. It just doesn’t compete with the much better managed fisheries further north to begin with. And then it collapsed due to disease and climate change about a decade back. To the extent that there even is local lobster any more it just tends to be a lot more expensive than any other options.
Hi Boingboing, fyi, the picture shows a Blue walleye not a tuna.
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Perhaps forever, because the definitive source is hidden behind a paywall. Here’s the Leibert abstract.
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