How The Times Conducted Its Subway Tuna Investigation

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It started in January, when Choire Sicha, then The New York Times’s Styles editor, posed a question to his team on an internal messaging platform that went something like this:

Who wants to buy a Subway tuna sandwich and send it to a lab?

America’s largest sandwich chain had just been sued by two Los Angeles customers who said that the meat that Subway was advertising as tuna was, in fact, something else entirely. Julia Carmel, a news assistant who covers nightlife and writes for the Styles section, volunteered to investigate. She procured 60 inches of tuna sandwiches from three Los Angeles locations, froze the meat and shipped it across the country to a commercial food testing lab that, two months later, was unable to determine conclusively which species of tuna it was — or whether it was tuna at all. She recently chronicled the odyssey in a 2,500-word deep dive, “The Big Tuna Sandwich Mystery.”

In a conversation, Ms. Carmel discussed her reporting process and how a gimmicky idea turned into a broader look at America’s food supply.

Are you a tuna fan?

I’m not a huge canned tuna person. I’m definitely more of a sushi eater. But I did eat a lot of fish while working on this article. My editors were sending me messages, too — “I can’t stop thinking about eating tuna now!”

From that first message in January to publication last week, you spent six months in Tuna Land. Where did you start?

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/insider/subway-tuna.html