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DNA Test Shows Subway's 'Chicken' Only Contains 50 Percent Chicken (arstechnica.com)
According to an investigation by Canadian media outlet, CBC, the chicken in Subway Restaurants' chicken sandwiches may only contain around 50 percent chicken -- the rest of it is soy, spices and preservatives. The investigation involved DNA testing chicken sandwiches collected from five popular fast food restaurants. While the rest of the sandwiches contained mostly chicken, Subway's oven-roasted chicken and the chicken strips in its Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich clocked in with just 53.6 percent and 42.8 percent chicken, respectively. Ars Technica reports: Among all the chicken sampled, there was a total of about 50 ingredients other than chicken identified. The chicken samples had an average of 16 ingredients. Some of the ingredients are expected, such as salt and other seasonings. But many were commercial preservatives and fillers. One commonality was that they all had high levels of salt. Subway responded to the CBC in a statement: "SUBWAY Canada cannot confirm the veracity of the results of the lab testing you had conducted. However, we are concerned by the alleged findings you had conducted." You can read the full statement here.
The companies in question - Wendy's, Subway, McDonalds, Tim Horton's - responded HERE.
Their responses sound reasonable, so either they are lying or the "DNA tests" are not accurate.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It is impossible to get any processed food that is not laden with salt and sugar. It contributes to high blood pressure and diabetes. Do the food companies care? Or will shipping "product" take precedence over their customers' health?
Piffle! That's a totally wrong spin! According to TFA, most of the other 50% is soy — the famously humane and environment-friendly replacement for meat.
Restaurants should proudly admit to being ahead of their customers on both counts — and wow to make their sandwiches 90% meat-free by 2050, or something like that.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This means that people who would not touch soy products, people who think tofu is disgusting but have never tried it, people who would never order a product called Subway Soy Chicken Sandwich, or Yum Yum Soy Meat-O Chicken Sandwich, have been eating soy product for some time and not caring. Let us all reflect on this valuable lesson about the value of Soy products and how they can provide a delicious and affordable source of protein to millions of people. J Edgar Hoover Subway Corporation
They obviously used alternative chickens, duh!
FAKE NEWS!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
half a million dollars in attorney’s fees. $1 off coupon for the rest of us.
Yes, read the response, but like all communications from large companies, you have to read it critically
For example, from the end of Subway's response:
We will look into this again with our supplier to ensure that the chicken is meeting the high standard we set for all of our menu items and ingredients.
Translate this into normal english and it is "We do not adequately QA our supply chain & our lowest-bid supplier is giving us a chicken/soy blend. We only care about this because we just got caught out"
My pics.
I enjoy meat myself - but accept that the meat industry is historically filled with some of the worst intentions on the face of the planet. There's a reason that one of the big counters to libertarian philosophy is historical regulation of the meat industry... if they can get away with it, you'd better believe that the industry is going to break just about every rule, custom, ethical guideline and concept of decent human interaction possible.
Meat, it ain't pretty, it's rarely pure (the fish industry is nigh-hilarious with how it labels things), but it's still an important part of our filthy culture.
Cutting a 50% mix of soy into chicken isn't shocking compared to most things - and actually matches what I remember of that particular flavor whenever I decided to try chicken again at Subway. Now that I've gotten better at cooking for myself, I find a $6 footlong to be actually a fairly expensive sandwich.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go make a nice couple of egg/bacon/veggie sandwiches. I'm sure it's not completely ethical, and likely contains some genetic engineering (ooh, scary), but for the price, it's a marvel of modern industry and flavor!
Ryan Fenton
Colonel... you ARE the father!
Right. I love the one that admits they use 1% soy and still flexes the "made from 100% chicken" line, which is technically true of anything containing even a scrap of real chicken, and it's clear from the context they're relying on this technical interpretation.
They just need to market it better.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The oven-roasted chicken doesn't surprise me, as it consists of ground chicken combined with a bunch of other stuff and formed into the shape you see, but the chicken strips do surprise me. They look like they were sliced right out of the meat as-is, no grinding/reforming.
I have cut up a lot of chickens. Never seen any chicken parts that look remotely like Subways. Clearly extruded food, like a chicken 'nugget'.
McDonald's and Wendy's claim to be serving 'chicken breasts'. I don't eat McShits, but the Chicken at Wendy's does look like an actual chicken breast, just a very small one.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Public schools have served mystery meat for decades and no one ever died from that
We recognize that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so our imitation chicken is leading us all into a new, more courageous* future, where we will be 100%, BRAVE, not CHICKEN!
"courageous" is the intellectual property of Apple Inc. "chicken" includes, but is not limited to, dog, cat, yeast, nuclear waste, chicken feathers, beaks, claws, recycled newspaper (for that genuine cardboard-y takeout taste).May include nuts. May not include chicken..
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It could be 50% Soylent.
Obviously you didn't read the article OR watch the show. They explain their methodology and you can clearly see how fake the Subway chicken looks. They also re-did the Subway test to make sure it wasn't an anomaly, buying another bunch of take-outs and having them tested as well.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
So even though this is false representation, isn't it also healthier?
so of course quality had to slip.
Chinese buffets everywhere are now laughing nervously.
Hahaha
"However, we are concerned by the alleged findings you had conducted."
Is that even a sentence? The findings are not alleged, they are real. You get to say a guy was allegedly killed with an alleged bullet. You can say the alleged killer is Whatsisname because that hasn't been proven. However if a lab signs off on a DNA analysis I can say it's real all I want - if it turns out that it's not then the LAB is in trouble, not me, because the lab certified the results.
And you don't "conduct findings". Wow, I'm worried that Subway let the junior PR person handle this.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Well, I'm personally relieved. I wouldn't want anything that was made with some percentage of unreal chicken.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A better study would report total protein and attempt to assay proteins and marker entities to distinguish from chicken vs other animal vs soy.
Of course, the analytical costs on the second part would be higher.
If the report is true, it might give new meaning and range to the phrase, "rubber chicken"
I remember this same thing happening to Taco Bell. The problem is that chicken meat is already 60-80 percent water, where as everything else is dry ingredients. If the dry ingredients absorb moisture from the chicken does the percentage drop? What exactly are they measuring?
Chicken chicken
It came off as sarcastic, not trolly to me.
Don't you see what's really happening here? SUBWAY has managed hybridize chickens with soy and other plants for spices! Now I know that I am living in the future! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Whatever happened with yoga mats compounds being found in Subway bread couple of years ago, has everyone forgotten that, or did I dream that?
Alas, maybe the other 50% of the so called chicken is ground yoga mats. After all, they have to recycle them somehow and Subway provides untraceable recycling service (just dump it into food).
After all everything we eat today is so poisoned but the industry is slowly killing us so that by the time die off happens, it can't be pegged on them.
So what is the other 50%?
The article seems ambiguous on this point at best.
I find it hard to believe that the whole other 50% was just salt and spices, not least because of how bland Subway chicken actually is.
CBC is not a "media outlet". It is Canada's national broadcaster. And it does a damned good job on its news and public affairs, routinely shaming the US networks with its national and international coverage.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I eat a 12" roast chicken sub and I am hungry an hour later. I eat a 12" safeway chicken breast sub, I have to digest like a snake for days. I also knew something was off with Subway.
no more for me
Why did the Chicken cross the Road?
To get to the Subway.
But they only made it 50% of the time, it seems.
eating subway. Lots of folks can't handle processed soy protein.
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I remember watching a Subway commercial years ago where Jared was comparing their chicken sandwich to KFC's. He said that they used "real" chicken. So I decided to buy a chicken sub just to confirm what I already know. Their chicken was just a gaint chicken nugget. If KFC is fake there's more convincing.
Wow, I have to give credit to Subway for making good enough tasting chicken (for me), mixed in with cheaper plant substitute. I had assumed it was all meat, albeit maybe some pink slime mixed in. It makes me respect the economic efficiency of Subway even more.
There's supposed to be chicken in there?
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Subway several years ago has been discovered adding some rubber filaments to the bread.
Now they say that the meat is only 50% meat.
Probably they need to beef up those margins.
Salt, sugar, water, and the various other chemical additives don't have DNA. The article is about % DNA. So it's actually worse than one might think. Brine + chicken would come out as 100% chicken. Decent chicken should be 90% even when seasoned and that's close to what a few of the manufacturers actually had. The 43.5% on subway strips should be criminal.
"DNA Test Shows Subway's 'Chicken' Only Contains 50 Percent Chicken"
I'm surprised it contained any chicken at all, frankly.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
So wait... that asspussy was really just an ass?
Is this the part where we can finally consider chicken as part-time vegetarian choice?
Botched quote: However, we are concerned by the alleged findings you had conducted.
This is a blend of the first and second sentences of the actual statement.
Just sayin'.
I prefer chicken with 50% soy rather than 100% chicken packed with chicken fat, skin, feathers, and bowels.
extruded or not
It could have been worse, e.g. soylent green.
Is it me, or does it seem like you are getting mostly bread and paying more for it? Don't get me wrong. The other sub making sandwich companies are many times worse than Subway, those guys empty your wallet and fail to fill your stomach. With their "fancy name, or appearance" sub sandwiches.
I eat vegetables in my sub that I hardly eat otherwise? And no it's not just lettuce.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Unreal Chicken. Isn't that the code name for the upcoming flavor based interface for the Unreal Engine?
Why is Snark Required?
It is the law, but only in New York City. Not even the State, AFAIK.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Subway is the cheapest lunch you can get in many markets - often cheaper than McDonald's on a calories-per-dollar metric. Soy is cheap volume filler and salt makes the flavor more apparent while doubling as an exceptionally cheap preservative. Corporate is doing everything they can to pay their employees as little as possible - while taking as much as possible from the franchisees - and they found this is another way to improve the margin.
After all they didn't surpass the expansion rate of McDonald's by relentlessly pursuing quality or the propagation of a healthy product.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Most restaurants that sell sandwiches are primarily trying to sell you a very large hunk of bread with as little protein as possible. It's not just sub shops, it's anywhere.
I went low carb for a couple of years and one of the shocking things was ordering sandwiches and even hamburgers and finding out that there was very little meat inside. I often had to order two sandwich items to get enough food to not feel extremely hungry.
One of the few places where I don't feel like I'm just being fed bread is Potbelly if you order one of their "flats". These are some kind of flat bread which is quite thin. I suppose other chains may have something similar. I still often order it with double meat if there's some question what and when dinner will be.
At Jimmy John's you can get a lettuce wrap, which is kind of messy but serviceable. I prefer a hot sandwich, though, and I don't know of anyplace that will do a hot lettuce wrap.
New Subway spokesweasel Kellyanne Conway says that Subway is just offering "alternative chicken".
DNA testing cannot possibly be quantitatively correlated to the mass ratio content of any sampled substance. i'm not saying its all chicken, just that the test is irrelevant. and salt has no DNA.
Is it me, or does it seem like you are getting mostly bread and paying more for it? Don't get me wrong. The other sub making sandwich companies are many times worse than Subway, those guys empty your wallet and fail to fill your stomach. With their "fancy name, or appearance" sub sandwiches.
I eat subway maybe once a week and load up on all of the vegetables. The $6 footlong deal with carved turkey and all the veggies is two meals. I consider it a decent deal.
subway was caught by the cbc making their whole wheat bread with the white bread recipe and carmel colour added.
was on an episode of marketplace a few years ago.
First time I recall seeing a story linked by both Slashdot and the Drudge Report. But now I know why I only tried that bland slab they call chicken once.
Their QA is probably working just fine. They probably actually SPECIFIED the formula that was uncovered by the DNA tests, in order to cut costs.
The chicken at Wendy's is real chicken. The reason it's not 100% is if you have the breading on it (crispy style), the seasonings, etc. You just can't mix up chicken with soy in a blender and have the outcome resemble chicken with the same texture. I don't think it's that small either at Wendy's, too much of it hangs out the side of the buns.
A while back I went on a "cleansing" diet. It was a few weeks of taking a few products from a company, shakes (powders) made from plants, and another product that is a shake/powders high in fiber. Also from plants. Carrots, beets, some herbs. The plan also includes fruits and veggies. You know the idea: starvation and torture.
About 2 weeks in I was driving home and realized I had no veggies or fruit to speak of at home, it was late, I was staved, blah blah, and I made the fateful decision to get some food at Kentucky Fried Chicken. But I got the grilled, instead of the original fried.
Now, after two weeks without any spices to speak of, no salt, pepper, and no sugar, my taste buds had recalibrated. One bit of the chicken was sooo salty it was a painful, burning experience.
When I started to reintroduce regular food, I found my new sensitive taste buds could take way too salty and sweet food at in most restaurant food. Things you wouldn't suspect, like sweet french fries. This was more true lower on the price scale, and less so at some wholesome fancy restaurants.
My point is is if you eat prepared foods, restaurant, micro-wave, grab at go, you get high doses of salt and sugar and with enough exposure your taste buds loose sensitivity to those two things. So your detectors no longer work very well.
I'm eating a lot more home cooked food these days.
Low carbing is a real education in what food is really made of.
I don't know about the US but at least in the UK the labelling is fairly sane, as far as I know.
Well, as long as the non-chicken animal content is zero percent ...
They are all saying they made their stuff from 100% chicken, but do not disclose the proportion of chicken versus the rest. For all you know , it could be 49% wheat protein 50% chicken breast , and 1% seasoning and they could still state the truth !
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I really don't see the problem here. All of the meat is 100% chicken. Sure there are other ingredients, but did they ever claim otherwise? If Subway manages to replace an ingredient that is produced by killing animals typically raised and held in a cruel way with an ingredient that is as nutricious, but does not require any animals and is better for the environment, then that is a net win for everyone.
Subway needs a new logo.
I seem to recall the EU forcing some labelling requirements onto the backs of its subjugated countries, to ensure consumers have reading-material while pigging out.
Yeah, but it just relies on tessellation to make things look better.
So lazy.
Turkey is my favourite vegetable too.
More so because it thinks it is European.
Right. I love the one that admits they use 1% soy and still flexes the "made from 100% chicken" line, which is technically true of anything containing even a scrap of real chicken, and it's clear from the context they're relying on this technical interpretation.
It's the same thing that lets McDonalds say their burgers are made from "100% beef", well yes, in the sense that a cow's arsehole is beef.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Turkey is fine if you coat it in breadcrumbs or batter and fry it in butter, but then so is almost anything else, including courgettes and Mars Bars.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Subway supplies the recipe. The "chicken" strips are indeed far from what you would call chicken. Most of the actual chicken product is ground skin, fat, gristle and bone. Can't say why I know, but I wouldn't eat it.
It tastes bad too. Between the yoga-mat plastic in the bread and the chance of getting intestinal sickness it is on my avoid list....
love is just extroverted narcissism
Obviously you didn't read the article OR watch the show
I read part of the article, but stopped once they claimed their DNA test resulted in salt.
A) Salt is a mineral and has no DNA
B) Salt is very typically added to any material being DNA tested, as it chemically has an effect on the DNA that aids the testing itself
I'm not a chemist and so can't explain the details of B, but it looks like one would always find salt in a sample after it is DNA tested because you are the one adding it in, and finding that salt would not come from the DNA test but some other chemical analysis.
If the article was just some reporter then sure I would assume they fucked up relaying the scientific information told to them, as per typical of reporters.
But this is their direct publishing of claimed scientific results stating something physically impossible to detect this way and that would be detected by other means 100% of the time as it is caused by their own actions.
It's like claiming their DNA test found DNA and that is bad.
Why bother reading past such a statement?
You need a DNA test to tell chicken from spices and soy? I do not think so ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Sandwich.. Now I know why. :P
Meat is murder. Each chicken has a soul. Stop eating meat, you all can't even taste the difference and this proves it. As pandas choose to eat bamboo despite having the digestive system of a carnivorous bear, so should you choose to be vegetarian and stop using the invalid excuse that biology is destiny.
don't eat at Subway
I'm a little confused as to how they determined that this was only 50% chicken.
You could do some type of quantitative PCR and try to measure relative amounts of chicken DNA vs soy DNA, but that doesn't necessarily mean those are the actual proportion. DNA is relatively fragile, and processing could skew the results.
For example, suppose the chicken is partially cooked then marinated in a soy sauce based marinade. Much of the chicken DNA could have been denatured or destroyed, which could cause it to be underrepresented in the PCR analysis, whereas the uncooked soy sauce might retain much more of it's structure and become relatively overrepresented in the analysis.
All of these issues can be controlled for. It just depends on the nitty gritty details of the experimental method, which I'm not seeing any link to or common upon by the news media.
It's also entirely possible that the meat has been modified.
We don't have enough information to tell.
They're not as small as some. But not as big as the good frozen chicken breasts at the grocery store. Roughly like the super cheapies, I've never seen a chicken breast as small as a Carl's Jr one in the store, and they charge a super premium price for their non-fried chicken sandwiches.
At least they are chicken.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm so glad I'm vegan...
Go to an actual Deli and order a sandwich instead of subway...you'll get 2-3x the meat, far less bread, and better quality (often fresh sliced) meat. Oh, and it will cost about the same too.
For sandwiches I'm still at a loss as to why people go to subway other than the bread smell.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Going to an actual deli isn't always a very viable option because they're not that common, at least around here.
Subway is awful, but I think a lot of people see it as a fresh alternative to greasy fast food. And it mostly is if you stick to cold cuts and vegetables. It's all low quality no matter what.
And their awfulness has insured they have a ton of competitors, Jimmy Johns, Whichwich, Potbelly, and probably others, too.
I went through a phase where I tried to really reduce animal protein form my diet, and one of the most foul things I ever tasted in the attempt was "Chick'n", some plant-based product that was supposed to look and taste like chicken. I couldn't even stomach a single bite. I spit it strait out and insulted several deities.
If Subway really is serving a product that's 50% soy (or whatever), and people eat it without thinking it's not 100% chicken - wow. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Its ok, I always get double meat.
Anyone think that Jared is going to pack the pounds back on with all that prison junk food?
Find a Thai place. Exact recipe seems to differ from one place to another for a lettuce wrap, but find one you like and you'll be in heaven.