A millipede in a can of smoked oysters.
Wise advice. It immediately brought to mind the time I took a nice big bite of an apple, swallowed it, held it up to take another bite, and a worm – or a portion of a worm – started crawling out of a hole that I had exposed. I’m hoping it was still an intact worm.
Ants accidentally ingested with potato chips have a lovely spicy flavor to them. Although after discovering that I didn’t eat any more of the bag of chips for some strange reason.
Food is not magically immune from these sorts of things.
One problem that was made much of at the time was a problem with “wrap around” jar lids.
These are often used on jelly, spaghetti sauce, pickles or other jars you will reseal.
What happens is that in shipping one jar will break and splatter food over the neighboring jars, getting up under the wrap of the lid. The contents are still sealed, but the lid now attracts insects or larvae. When you open the jar at home, the “vacuum button” on the lid pops up, signaling that the seal is still intact. Un fortunately, at that very instant the insect is sucked onto the food. So now it looks like it was in the sealed jar all along.
So, look under the lids.
:eek: That’s been a nightmare of mine ever since I saw an old magazine ad in a book in 2nd grade. It was about how ‘surprising’ some product or another was- it showed a woman holding two halves of an egg shell and looking amazed at a little fluffy chick in a bowl in front of her. I didn’t think it was cute at all- even fully-developed chicks don’t hatch all fluffy like that, and being transported and refridgerated would certainly kill it, leaving a digusting little bundle [shudder]…
Oh, jeez. Friday night’s dinner was Meat Lover’s pizza for me.
I’m not so sure now about the Friday night, been working all week, don’t feel like cooking, why doncha pick something up on the way home, honey? habit.
I found smoked oysters in a can of smoked oysters. I wanted to try them and found out I hated them.
I’ve found coakroaches in my chili before. I was in the Army, stationed at Ft. Gordon, sitting the NCO club. Ordered a bowl, and discovered a cooked roach right on top! The damned thing looked just like a kidney bean. Being in the NCO club, I wasn’t even comped, just offered another bowl! :eek:
(I said no thanks)
Formic acid. Mmm, tangy.
My husband found a nice wriggling green worm in his salad at Applebee’s. The manager offered to buy us dessert. We declined. I wanted to run out on the check, seeing as how I was now pretty put off my dinner, but husband insisted on paying the bill.
I’ve actually seen that twice. Nowhere near a farm. It can be disconcerting the first time, to say the least.
The last of my chicken fingers at Shoneys was raw in the middle. I say last, in that a) I had already eaten the rest of the chicken fingers and b) I will never eat at Shoneys again.
I can’t believe they didn’t do more than that. If you’d bit down on the glass, it would have been ugly. The same thing happened to me, but it was at a potluck–I took a bite of green bean casserole (yeah, I know, that was a bad choice to start with), and luckily I didn’t bite down–I think I had a sense that something was wrong, maybe I felt something strangely hard, so I spit it out, and there was a good-sized, very jagged piece of glass. :eek: I found another piece of glass in the rest of the beans. It turns out, someone brought the casserole in a dish with a chipped lid. It’s amazing that no one ate a mouthful of glass. What’s really strange is, I still eat at potlucks.
Two summers ago… Very VERY hot day. Went to the local pizza place and just got a small coke… Sip… Sip… Sucking noise because I’m at the very bottom… Sucking noise because I’m at the very bottom… Take off the top to get a piece of ice to suck on… And there’s a short, black, curly hair in there among the ice.
I was pissed… I went right back in and told them what I found in their ice… not so quietly. It was lunch hour.
I brought a large sealed bag of saffron back from northern Thailand with the intention of selling it to a store for a hefty profit. I put it in my kitchen cupboard and forgot about it for a while. Then I was in a spice shop, so mentioned to the proprieter that I had some saffron for sale. She seemed interested, so I said I’d bring it in the next day for her to have a look. On returning to the kitchen, I pulled the bag out of the cupboard and was surprised to find that rather than the vibrant pinky-yellow it originally had been, the saffron was now dark brown.
On closer examination I discovered that there was absolutely no saffron left in the bag at all: it was entirely full of thousands of dead bugs. Their eggs must have travelled over in the bag and in the weeks in the cupboard, hatched, ate all the saffron, and died of starvation.
Result: a net loss, no profit for me, but every cloud has a silver lining - I did get a horrible creeping feeling up my back.
I was eating some (heated) frozen spinach a few years ago.
After chewing the first mouthful for a while I realised that it was unusually crunchy for spinach, so I spat it out to see what I was chewing. It was a cockroach.
Just how did you know the larva was tough??? 
Lessee… found a bit of plastic mixed in with my sandwich at Panera some months back - clearly a wrapper from some ingredient or other. I actually went to the website from the receipt and commented but never heard back from them.
A dead bug of some sort on the lettuce on a hamburger at Wendy’s, some years back. Oddly, that wasn’t too horrible, I just took it back to the register. I had a bowl of their pseudochili instead.
The Tastykake Krimpets I got from the vending machine at college. The first bite or two tasted funny. I looked at the next one in the package and it had fuzzy bits. Blech.
The large branching blood vessel in a can of chunky chicken soup. Harmless enough but it put me off that particular brand of soup for a bit.
The package of ramen noodles that had dead bugs in it. Yes, they were dead even before we boiled the stuff (I kid, I kid… we did not attempt to cook/eat the product).
The box of brown rice that had extra protein (some sort of little worms/maggots).
Years ago I was eating at a Naugles fast food place (they were later bought out by Del Taco) and found something interesting in my combination burrito: a large, teflon-coated screw. It was about three-quarters of an inch long and apparently came out of the cooker where the refried beans were, uhh, refried.
I don’t recall what if anything I did about it, except thank my stars that I didn’t bite down on it.
Way back in the Stone Age, when I was a kid, my mother bought us a pack of chocolate chip cookies at the grocery store. We kids were camped out on the couch, watching TV and eating cookies when one of us happened to look in the bag as they were grabbing a cookie. There was a little greenish worm in the bag! Of course, we alll had to get a good look at the thing, and of course, we couldn’t eat any more of those cookies. I don’t remember if my mom took it back for a new package or just threw it away.
I was looking through the heads of cabbage and stumbled upon a head of human.
Just kidding.
For reals though, I guess I’ve been lucky. Hairs of all kinds, but that’s about it.
Thanks to this thread, I am only going to eat clear food from now on.