You know the old saying that everything tastes like chicken?
Well, unfortunately, that saying is probably somewhat accurate -- and if you're a Canadian who has been eating chicken sandwiches with no worries at Subway restaurants, you may want to rethink your order. A new DNA analysis by CBC Marketplace of the poultry in several of the sandwich chain's grilled chicken sandwiches and wraps concluded that only half of the "chicken" products were actually composed of the bird.
Um, what?
You might think that if you order a totally untampered with piece of chicken at Subway, that your chicken was -- well -- 100 percent chicken, right?
Wrong.
Even though marinades, seasonings and the processing of meat might bring the number down, CBC Marketplace found that most chains still had numbers near 100 percent when it came to testing meats like chicken. Subway was an outlier with a scant 50 or so percent being authentic chicken.
The oven-roasted chicken scored 53.6 percent chicken DNA, and the chicken strips clocked in at a mere 42.8 percent chicken DNA -- that's less than half!
On the plus side, it turns out the majority of the remaining DNA didn't end up being something totally heinous, like fish bladder, or pigs snouts, or cow intestines or something else utterly scandalous. The majority of the remaining DNA was concluded to actually be soy.
Of course, that doesn't make it okay.
"That's misrepresentation," a Toronto resident named Irene Valenta told CBC Marketplace after seeing the results.
Subway, however, is fighting back and defending itself for its practices.
"Our recipe calls for one per cent or less of soy protein in our chicken products," it said in a response to CBC Marketplace.
"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."
While we appreciate that the company is looking into the claims and wants to ensure that customers receive exactly what they ordered, we're still a little put off by the fact that this could have been going on unchecked for quite some time!
What do you think of the DNA results?