The conventional wisdom here in America has always been: The faster the food is, the less healthy it will be.
A microwaved burrito isn’t going to have nearly the flavor, (let alone the nutritional value), of your local Mexican restaurant. A fish filet from a frozen box in the grocery store won’t compare to a trout filet from a Michelin Star restaurant on the coast.
Or, perhaps a more poignant example of the quality difference here would be the fact that places like Taco Bell are using beef that is only sort of beef. Or, a percentage of the beef is actually beef.
This is better than Subway, however, whose tuna fish sub was recently found to have exactly zero tuna fish DNA in it.
The New York Times published a report Sunday, which revealed that lab tests didn’t find “amplifiable tuna DNA” in Subway’s infamous tuna sandwich.
NYT submitted “60 inches worth of Subway tuna sandwiches” from three separate Los Angeles locations for lab analysis in wake of the lawsuit filed earlier this year alleging the sandwich chain was serving customers “a mixture of various concoctions that do not constitute tuna.” The suit claims that independent lab tests showed the company meant to “imitate” tuna’s appearance by blending together these unknown ingredients.
The study, commissioned by NYT, failed to not only identify tuna DNA, but the lab couldn’t even determine the origins of the fish in the provided sandwiches. “No amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample and so we obtained no amplification products from the DNA. Therefore, we cannot identify the species,” the results read.
But this might not be as bad as it seems:
“There’s two conclusions. One, it’s so heavily processed that whatever we could pull out, we couldn’t make an identification,” a lab spokesperson explained. “Or we got some and there’s just nothing there that’s tuna.” NYT spoke with a tuna expert who pointed out that the protein can be difficult to identify once it becomes broken down after being cooked.
