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Yosemite under Orion's gaze

Thursday, July 21, 2022

A little bit fishy

A judge is letting a lawsuit against Subway proceed.  The company bills their tuna sandwich as 100% tuna and nothing else. A customer tested a sandwich and found negligible if any traces of tuna and in fact, evidence of pork and chicken.

A federal judge says a woman's lawsuit against Subway can move forward, refusing the restaurant chain's request to dismiss the suit that alleges its tuna sandwiches "partially or wholly" lack tuna.Plaintiff Nilima Amin of Alameda County, Calif., says Subway misled her and other consumers by saying its sandwiches and other products contain "tuna" and "100% tuna."

Subway maintains that it only serves "100 % wildcaught skipjack tuna." The plaintiffs differ.

In the filing, the plaintiffs alleged that 19 of the 20 samples collected from Subway locations in Southern California contained “no detectable tuna DNA sequences whatsoever,” based on DNA bar coding tests conducted by the Barber Lab at UCLA’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. They also alleged that all 20 samples contained “detectable sequences of chicken DNA," while 11 samples contained pork DNA and seven included cattle DNA. 

Subway chalks the foreign evidence up to cross contamination. Hey at least they didn't find any traces of yoga mat, right? Subway has embarked on an expensive ad campaign extolling the virtues of their real tuna. Stay tunad.


1 comment:

island guy said...

As DNA testing gets cheaper and easier there will probably be a lot more surprises like this one. Shakes my faith in whistleblowers that it is possible there was no tuna found in multiple samples. I wonder if it was a different kind of fish or just the dregs of industrial food byproducts? I hope this blows up, people need to think more about their food choices for a lot of reasons.