The basic evidence should be easy. Subway either can or cannot produce invoices showing the amount of tuna they bought and from whom they bought it and that facility can show evidence of whatever fishy thing they do produce.
This just isn’t that hard to solve. Subway knows how much tuna it sold and it won’t be hard to equate purchases with amount sold to a reasonable degree.
Given that the crux of the article is “this ain’t tuna” I think the picture choice was deliberate.
My first thought exactly. I am no DNA analyst, but at the temps typical of pressure canning a low acid food (like, oh, maybe tuna?) I would think the DNA would denature to a point of being pretty much unidentifiable. But somebody will make money on this.
I would hope there’s no bacterial DNA left in there either
I assume they don’t use real mayo, otherwise, chicken DNA?
But here’s the real story:
when Inside Edition sent samples from three Subway locations in Queens out for testing earlier this year, the lab found that the specimens were, indeed, tuna
Thanks for pointing out that easter egg; I missed it. The blue walleye is known for dubious arguments over whether it is a separate species being settled with DNA testing
definitely
If memory serves the suit started from the same “we mailed a sandwich away” sort of DNA test that found no results.
From the sounds of it Subway did present those exact records. The plaintiff responded by altering the claim to it bot being 100% the advertised species.
Still based on the same results free test.
Most commercial mayo uses pasteurized eggs, which also won’t have much DNA left.
I mean, what does 100% Tuna mean anyway? The other ingredients obviously aren’t tuna. The sandwich is made from 100% tuna, with added lettuce, bread, walleye, dolphin, mayo, cardboard, onions…
Best part of the article:
“I dealt with the tuna all the time,” Jen said. “The ingredients are right on the package and tuna is a relatively cheap meat. There would be no point to making replacement tuna to make it cheaper.”
And as an occasional consumer of Subway’s tuna, Jen said she’s confident it’s fish.
“I personally have a really weak stomach to fish, which is how we know the tuna is real,” she said. “Last time I ate it, I puked my guts out.”
Probably discussed in one of the DNA analysts’ journals.
like this one:
Interesting. Odds these guys used cutting edge analytic technique? Did not see anything about this being commercially available.
The paper’s more than 15 years old. Not so cutting edge anymore.
From the Times article:
Eventually, I found myself on the phone with a spokesman for a lab that specializes in fish testing. He agreed to test the tuna but asked that the lab not be named in this article, as he did not want to jeopardize any opportunities to work directly with America’s largest sandwich chain.
Perhaps similar concerns have impeded the growth of the publically available scientific literature.
Interesting. The paper shows that the preparation of canned tuna breaks its DNA into segments of about 200 base pairs or less (living tuna have 24 chromosomes of several million base pairs each, for a total genome size of nearly 800 Mbp). The DNA is identified with the help of PCR - the basic method used everywhere in genetics, and the innovation that makes it work on cooked tuna is the use of several sets of nested primers which allow the chain reaction to amplify the target sequence which may be present in the sample at various degrees of degradation. It’s not rocket science, but it does demonstrate that getting a useful DNA identification from cooked food requires extra work compared to the basic procedure for fresh samples.
Which probably explains the results discussed in the NYT article. It references an earlier test by Inside Edition where Subway tuna samples were sent to a lab called Applied Food Technologies, which apparently specializes in testing food, probably involving the methods from that paper, and it did positively confirm that the samples were tuna. The NYT sent samples to an anonymous lab which is described as “a lab that specializes in fish testing”, and also that “the lab was already wary about the challenges of identifying a fish that’s been cooked at least once, mixed with mayo, frozen and shipped across the country”, which seems to suggest that they normally only work with fresh samples and perhaps did not modify their methodology for this test. And as the paper shows, the basic test that works on fresh samples will fail on cooked ones.
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