July 15, 2021 — Subway’s CEO defended the company’s sandwiches after a class-action lawsuit questioned the veracity and sustainability of the chain’s tuna.
“We’re very proud of our tuna,” Subway CEO John Chidsey told CNN, adding that it is one of his two favorite sandwiches.
July 15, 2021 — July marks month number seven of the great Subway tuna sandwich debate. In January, two California women sued Subway, alleging that they tested several of the chain’s tuna sandwiches in a lab and found that the ingredients were not tuna nor fish, but a “mixture of various concoctions” mixed together to “imitate the appearance of tuna” (via the Washington Post). Subway fought back, saying that it uses only wild-caught tuna in its subs. The plaintiffs then slightly amended the lawsuit, The New York Times reported, questioning only whether or not the tuna is “100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin.”
That was only phase one of the controversy. Next, news outlet Inside Edition conducted its own investigation of the sandwiches. Reporters sent samples from three tuna subs to Applied Food Technologies for DNA testing, according to a press release sent to Mashed, and received confirmation that they all contained tuna. The story doesn’t end there. Last month, The New York Times published a story detailing its own investigation, which hired an anonymous testing center to test another round of sandwiches. The results? “No amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample.”
June 25, 2021 — Subway Restaurants has come to the defense of its tuna products and said it utilizes 100 percent wild tuna, after facing a class-action lawsuit and a New York Times report that claimed testing found no tuna DNA in the restaurant chain’s tuna sandwiches.
The DNA testing utilized by the lab in the New York Times report is not accurate for canned and/or processed tuna, according to both Subway and the founder of a top DNA testing lab for cooked and processed tuna who spoke to SeafoodSource.
June 23, 2021 — After facing a class-action lawsuit claiming that Subway’s tuna sandwiches do not contain tuna and the restaurant chain cannot prove the fish is sustainable, a new DNA lab report shows there is no tuna in the company’s tuna sandwiches.
The New York Times set up an independent lab test of 60 inches of tuna sandwiches from three Subway restaurants in Los Angeles, California. The testing, which included a polymerase chain reaction test that searched for DNA of five different tuna species, detected no tuna in the sandwiches.
June 22, 2021 — The Subway tuna lawsuit drama continues.
In January a lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging that the sandwich chain’s tuna sandwich is “made with anything but tuna.” Independent lab tests that were reportedly taken from multiple California Subway locations found that the tuna was a “mixture of concoctions that do not constitute tuna, yet have been blended together by defendants to imitate the appearance of tuna.” The two plaintiffs, Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin of Alameda County, were hoping to get their claim certified as class action, which would open the case up to others in California who bought tuna from Subway after January 21, 2017.
May 27, 2021 — Fresh and local are huge selling points for seafood, but when you buy fish or shellfish from local grocery stores and markets, are you getting what you’re paying for?
“People want Carolina shrimp. It’s that simple,” said Doug Cross, co-owner of Pamlico Packing, which gets locally caught seafood to North Carolina plates.
“Our shrimp, most of them, are caught in a more brackish environment in the Pamlico Sound, which is one of the best places in the world to grow a shrimp,” Cross said.
But Cross’ competition is not just coming from other coastal fishermen. With demand for fresh and local, many sellers are cutting corners by getting their seafood from other countries. And in some cases, high-demand fish is being mislabeled.
In the past two years, two North Carolina-based crab meat companies admitted in federal court they were labeling crab as a U.S. product when a lot of the meat was foreign.
May 21, 2021 — A Dutch firm is harnessing blockchain and DNA to disable what it has identified as a burgeoning illicit trade in wild sturgeon passed off as farmed product.
Geneusbiotech, which describes itself as a “genomics specialist company,” has introduced a traceability solution for sturgeon and caviar sold in Europe in a three-year collaboration with the Berlin Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB). The Amsterdam, the Netherlands-based company develops solutions for the food, luxury goods, and pharma sectors.
May 18, 2021 — When chemistry graduate student Abby Gatmaitan first visited the University of Texas at Austin on a recruiting tour, she learned about the MasSpec Pen—a handheld device that scientists there were developing to diagnose tumors on contact. “I knew that was where I wanted to do my research,” she says. Shortly after joining the lab, she realized that if the pen could categorize human tissue, it would probably also work on other animals.
Gatmaitan had a very specific problem in mind, and her hunch paid off. Her research, published this spring in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, showed that touching the tip of the “pen” to a sample of raw meat or fish could correctly identify the species it came from. The device was tested on five samples and took less than 15 seconds for each of them. Roughly the length of a typical ink pen, the tool provided answers about 720 times faster than a leading meat-evaluating technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing—and it was much easier to use. Gatmaitan says it could help scientists tackle a global conservation issue: mislabeled seafood.
Seafood fraud is not just a concern for the restaurant diner who orders expensive, wild-caught red snapper, only to wind up with a plate of mercury-laden tilefish. Such deception also threatens the environment. Mislabeled fishes often come from poorly managed fisheries that can harm local ecosystems. Sometimes a fish is passed off as the wrong species or is falsely claimed to have been caught in a different geographical area in order to evade conservation laws or sell a catch for more money than its market value.
March 17, 2021 — The first notable thing about the wild salmon fillet Dane Chauvel shows me is its colour – a rich red that, even over FaceTime, makes my mouth water. The second notable thing is that it’s definitely salmon.
This might not seem like a debatable fact. Chauvel is co-founder of Organic Ocean Seafood in Vancouver, Canada, housed in a historic building at the mouth of the 854-mile (1,375km) Fraser River, one of Canada’s main salmon courses. The company supplies many high-end restaurants, and wild-caught salmon makes up a large proportion of its sales.
But as the exclusive Guardian Seascape report indicating the extent of global seafood fraud has shown, it’s not always so easy to tell what your fish actually is. In the analysis of 44 studies worldwide, more than one in three seafood samples of 9,000 analysed were mislabelled.
Chauvel is not surprised by the revelations. “The fishing industry is a mess,” he says. “It’s dysfunctional.”
He can prove, however, that the salmon in his hands is a salmon, because the fish has been included in a random DNA testing programme – the world’s first.
March 15, 2021 — A Guardian Seascape analysis of 44 recent studies of more than 9,000 seafood samples from restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets in more than 30 countries found that 36% were mislabelled, exposing seafood fraud on a vast global scale.
Many of the studies used relatively new DNA analysis techniques. In one comparison of sales of fish labelled “snapper” by fishmongers, supermarkets and restaurants in Canada, the US, the UK, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, researchers found mislabelling in about 40% of fish tested. The UK and Canada had the highest rates of mislabelling in that study, at 55%, followed by the US at 38%.
Sometimes the fish were labelled as different species in the same family. In Germany, for example, 48% of tested samples purporting to be king scallops were in fact the less coveted Japanese scallop. Of 130 shark fillets bought from Italian fish markets and fishmongers, researchers found a 45% mislabelling rate, with cheaper and unpopular species of shark standing in for those most prized by Italian consumers.
Other substitutes were of endangered or vulnerable species. In one 2018 study, nearly 70% of samples from across the UK sold as snapper were a different fish, from an astounding 38 different species, including many reef‐dwelling species that are probably threatened by habitat degradation and overfishing.