Whole Foods tuna sandwich: not worth stealing

I’ve been thinking a lot about the case of Whole Foods versus employee Ralph Reese, who was fired from a New York City store for misconduct after a supervisor accused him of “trying to steal a sandwich by taking it from the trash at the end of his shift as a deli clerk.” I wrote about this incident, which is now playing out in the courts, on Tuesday.

The store accused him of taking a tuna sandwich out of the trash; Reese argues he set it aside, it was never in the trash and he was completely up front with the supervisor about his intention to eat it.

Was the sandwich really worth all this drama? To find out, I drove to the Whole Foods store in Overland Park to taste one of these pre-packaged “deli” sandwiches. I bought one, in a triangle-shaped clear plastic box, for $3.99. The two sandwich halves were visually attractive enough, but what about the taste? The list of ingredients didn’t give much of clue: tuna, celery, red onions, chopped carrot, mayonnaise, you know, the usual ingredients. The tuna salad — a little heavy on the mayo, I might note — was spread thickly between two slices of wheat bread with a couple of pieces of romaine. I took a big bite and found it to be really boring. Not even worthy of a second bite. It’s disappointingly mushy too, no marvelous crisp celery crunch that I could detect. The tiny bits of carrot at least gave it some color.

Whole Foods does sell, in the prepared foods case, a much tastier tuna salad made with cranberries. It retails for $9.99, which is a little more than I like to spend on tuna salad — I can make it at home for much less, including the cranberries. Still, the Whole Foods cranberry version was so good, I might consider stealing it. And the pre-packaged version that Ralph Reese hated to see thrown away? I threw it away.