If you’ve ever eaten a Subway tuna sub and thought to yourself “something about this tastes fishy — and not in a way that resembles an actual fish sandwich” well, you might be on to something! According to the Washington Post, a new lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleges that Subway’s tuna doesn’t actually contain tuna at all, but rather “a mixture of various concoctions that do not constitute tuna” and are merely “blended together… to imitate the appearance of tuna.”
That already sounds disgusting enough, but prepare yourself. It gets worse.
Shalini Dogra, an attorney for one of the two plaintiffs named in the suit, told the Washington Post that independent lab tests taken of multiple samples from California Subway locations found that “the ingredients were not tuna and not fish,” though declined to reveal the exact results of the lab tests.
So if it’s not tuna and it’s not fish… what the hell is it? Soy? Kelp?
Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin, two residents of Alameda County in Northern California’s Bay Area are the two plaintiffs currently identified in the complaint and are suing Subway for a number of claims under federal and state laws including fraud, intentional misrepresentation, and unjust enrichment. Their attorneys hope to widen the scope of the claim to a class action suit, which means if you’ve purchased a tuna sandwich from Subway anytime after January 21st, 2017, you might actually see a few bucks out of this.
This isn’t the first time Subway has been sued for making false claims — they’ve gotten heat in the past for lying about the size of their footlongs (how embarrassing). And in recent years people have really been sweating their ingredients; you may recall that the chain’s bread isn’t legally considered bread in Ireland. Something fishy indeed.