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Once upon a time, Subway was considered the healthy fast food option. It even had a weight-shedding mascot (who later, uh, fell on hard times). It still mostly is, if only but only because the bar for health at quick-turnaround eateries remains so low. To say the chain has fallen on hard times would be too much; they remain the world’s largest sandwich purveyor. But since 2015 the total number of locations has been in decline. And a new investigative piece by The New York Times — which calls into question the veracity of what they sell as tuna — may not help.

The piece is a response to a class action lawsuit first reported in January, which claims Subway’s popular tuna sandwiches “are completely bereft of tuna as an ingredient.” The company’s brass has categorically denied the allegations, but the Times decided to send away samples from the chain to a lab, to see if they could get a read on the mystery meat. And — in a piece that, incidentally, doubles as a fascinating look at how canned tuna became a staple of American pantries — they got their answer. Sort of.

“No amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample and so we obtained no amplification products from the DNA,” the lab’s answer read. “Therefore, we cannot identify the species.”

Mind you, this doesn’t mean Subway’s tuna isn’t tuna. For one, the reporter explains that getting a pure sample of the meat, even after only requesting only tuna, wasn’t easy. The tuna that arrives in a Subway tuna sandwich has been mixed with, among other things, mayonnaise. Moreover, after tuna is cooked, as it is before being placed in a can, the meat becomes “denatured” — that, as the Times puts it, “the fish’s characteristic properties have likely been destroyed, making it difficult, if not impossible, to identify.”

There are other caveats:

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.”

Furthermore, Inside Edition tried the same thing, and the lab they dealt with deemed the specimens to be indeed tuna. On top of that, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit softened their original claims in June, worried instead that it wasn’t “100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin tuna.”

One other thing to consider: Among the people interviewed in the NYT piece is a former Subway “sandwich artist,” who had this fairly convincing piece of testimony in defense of the chain:

“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.”

The piece has made waves, though some of the reactions involve shock that people are trying to eat relatively healthy at a Subway.

There were also Soylent Green jokes.

And other jokey speculations.

Bottom line: It’s inconclusive whether the Subway tuna isn’t tuna, though surely eating whatever it is is healthier than their other offerings, such as the Chicken & Bacon Ranch Melt.

(Via NYT)