My sister bit a tüñå.
No, too hard. I’m just going to call it cartoona.
The NYTimes article said that there were good reasons why tuna wouldn’t have shown up on the DNA, and that it had tested positive for tuna when Inside Edition had it tested.
(bolding mine)
The spokesman from the lab offered a bit of analysis. “There’s two conclusions,” he said. “One, 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.” (Subway declined to comment on the lab results.)
To be fair, 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.
Even the plaintiffs have softened their original claims. In a new filing from June, their complaints centered not on whether Subway’s tuna was tuna at all, but whether it was “100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin tuna.”
With all testing, there are major caveats to consider. 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.
IMHO the answer is clear.
It is not tuna.
It is tuna with mayo. 
Mind you, sister bites can be pretty nasty.
So all you have to do to destroy DNA is cook something and it turns into a mystery substance that may as well have been thrown out of the window of a passing UFO? …In a murder trial: .‘Did the victim die from eating a tuna sandwich, Counselor?’ … ‘The victim expired after eating a sandwich but it is unknown what kind. No one can determine if it was or was not tuna.’
That New York Times article is journalistic malfeasance. They did a shitty investigation with an inappropriate method and pack it into a long, long article full of false balance. They mention others have managed to get a valid DNA-sample from sandwich bound “tuna” and that shoved it was tuna, but that gets relegated to a single short paragraph inbetween the waffling about how fish is mislabeled the world over and how the didn’t find tuna DNA though mumble mumble cooking denatures DNA.
And of course it’s being promoted as a win for the loons suing Subway.
No, but it does turn into a mystery substance you can’t run DNA-matching tests on. And people aren’t interested in a result of “our tests show this is definitely cooked fish of some sort”.
Has Subway ever claimed that it was? And even for that much weaker claim, do they have any actual evidence? If so, then let’s see that evidence, instead of quibbling about irrelevant and inconclusive test results.
EDIT: That was a quote from the source that @needscoffee was quoting, not from @needscoffee himself.
That’s how I read it at first, too, DNA isn’t protein, what are they talking about?
On further reading, it starts to make sense. When they say “DNA” they mean it in the molecular biology sense, but when they say “protein” they mean it in the nutritional sense. So chicken, tofu, fish, beef, etc. are all proteins, as as distinguished from carbohydrates (the bread) and fat (cheese, mayonnaise).
So the statement could have made more sense if it said, “DNA tests can’t always determine what kind of meat it is.”
That whole NYT article was oddly written. It came across more as a blog/teaser/clickbait than a piece of journalism. All those pages just to say that the results were inconclusive due to the fish having been cooked. I guess she had to justify the $500 PCR test fee somehow.
Maybe Subway was bought out by the Hungry Heifer, as made famous in the sitcom Cheers?
- Norm Peterson : [about his and Cliff’s meal at The Hungry Heifer] Yeah, Cliffy had himself the tunnel T-bone. For less than four bucks, you get 24 ounces of USDA choice US bef.
Cliff Clavin : Bef? You mean beef.
Norm Peterson : Beef? Don’t be ridiculous Cliffy, that stuff is bef. You see, it’s a Hungry Heifer trademark for a processed, synthetic, what… , meat-like substance.
Cliff Clavin : Ohh, Norm.
Norm Peterson : What do expect for four bucks? Do you hear me complain about the loobster?
Its fucking tuna.
You’re not going to get successful PCR amplification from something that’s been treated with god knows what, frozen and refrozen, cooked(!), and mixed with crap that is likely full of PCR inhibitors.
It’s a stupid clickbait fishing-for-a-lawsuit-settlement exercise. Nothing more.
This was my thought both in the current iteration and the first time the Tuna-that-wasn’t came up. But actually, I find it kind of charming (in a weird way). Because a lot of click-bait is politically influenced, every time it comes up in unavoidable conversation (work break/lunch room) it gets tempers up. With this, everyone is happy to talk about it, with the “OMG I just had that for lunch yesterday” or “How dare they rip us off” outrage being pleasantly bi-partisan.
I still think it’s junk reporting though.
I haven’t been following this “story” at all, but couldn’t Subway rather easily dispel this by just showing the invoices for all the tuna they buy? Or do people think they’re buying tuna just to throw it in the trash?
Commercial spoof in the 1970s (most likely) - Chuck Connors is portraying “Angus McDougall (Scottish name at any rate)” and talks about 3 million hamburgers sold - “and that represents over 4 pounds of beef!” (numbers probably wrong (and it may not have been Chuck Conners, either)
People who engage in conspiracy theories don’t tend to believe suspicious things like “evidence”.
It may also be the case that Subway itself doesn’t know for sure. They trust (and likely audit) their suppliers, but it’s very easy for the odd bit of other fish to slip through without anybody realizing. But it’s almost certainly not a deliberate act and nothing untoward or unexpected. Pretty much a “up to 6 rat hairs per chocolate bar” kind of thing.
The main problem is that tuna is pretty cheap, like low quality beef. There’s no incentive for fast food chains to adulterate their products with what would almost certainly be more expensive alternatives.
I can open a can of store bought “tuna”, mix it with mayo and produce a sandwich clearly similar to that served at Subway. One slipshod scientific analysis seemingly performed in support of attention seeking clickbait would not be enough to change that.
Journalists have a number of responsibilities - social, professional, legal. I did not read the article. Perhaps they have skirted or crossed the lines.
I suspect they make their sandwich with a nut.
Sounds impressive.