Don’t Eat at Subway

What the hell is actually in a Subway sandwich, which really doesn’t deserve the name?

Subway describes its tuna sandwich as “freshly baked bread” layered with “flaked tuna blended with creamy mayo then topped with your choice of crisp, fresh veggies.” It’s a description designed to activate the saliva glands — and separate you from your money.

It’s also fiction, at least partially, according to a recent lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint alleges the ingredient billed as “tuna” for the chain’s sandwiches and wraps contains absolutely no tuna.

A representative of Subway said the claims are without merit. The tuna sold at the chain is wild-caught, the company says, which is how the vast majority of tuna is harvested. Only a tiny percentage of bluefin and yellowfin tuna is farmed.

The star ingredient, according to the lawsuit, is “made from anything but tuna.” Based on independent lab tests of “multiple samples” taken from Subway locations in California, the “tuna” is “a mixture of various concoctions that do not constitute tuna, yet have been blended together by defendants to imitate the appearance of tuna,” according to the complaint. Shalini Dogra, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, declined to say exactly what ingredients the lab tests revealed.

This is not the first time Subway has been classified as something short of food:

When Ireland’s Supreme Court recently announced its ruling in a years-long legal battle involving a local Subway franchisee, news coverage of the decision produced variations of the same eyebrow-raising headline: “Subway bread is not bread,” the Guardian reported.

The ruling stated that Subway rolls have too much sugar to meet the country’s legal definition of bread, according to the Irish Independent. Under a 1972 tax law, the sugar content of bread cannot exceed 2 percent of the weight of flour in the dough. Subway bread was found to have a sugar content of about 10 percent, the Independent reported.

What astounds me about Subway is how can you make sandwiches this bad? Everything about this should at least be…OK. But the bread is so bad, despite being loaded down with sugar. The meat products are extremely questionable all the way around. And if you had to eat at Subway, why would you go with the tuna for god’s sake. That’s got to be the worst of the worst. About twice a year, maybe on the road or something, I succumb to circumstance and eat at Subway, thinking that it can’t be that bad. And then it is indeed that bad and worse. The only possible excuse for eating there is being a vegetarian on the road without other options, but even there, between Taco Bell and the Burger King Impossible burger, you do usually have other options.

Subway is just an atrocity.