Sue if you want. Don’t expect to get anything out of it aside from a tiny settlement that probably won’t cover your fees and costs.
Add me to the “It wasn’t in the bag” cohort.
First, it would have had to be frozen. Bug death.*
Next, it would have had to be steamed. Bud death.
You mentioned cold spots. But even if it were in a cold spot, it still would have been exposed to searing hot steam–the whole bag would have been full of it. The steam may not be enough to heat all the veggies all the way through, but searing hot steam is searing hot steam, and it kills things.
-FrL-
*Or maybe caterpillars can survive freezing?
Lots of them can, but probably not for the amount of time being sealed in a bag of frozen broccoli would entail.
They do make fresh nuke-in-the-bag veggies these days, not just frozen. This makes it more likely, but still questionable.
The KFC “fried rat” (check Snopes, I don’t think this one’s real) and the human finger incidents - assuming there are any that aren’t faked to get money from the company - differ in that you don’t normally expect that there might be rats in the fried chicken or human fingers in any food. Bugs on fresh vegetables, though? Yes, that can be expected. I even found a teeny little caterpillar in a brussels sprout that I was cutting up, just the other day. I made a face and tossed the sprout, then kept going. Consider this a lesson as to why washing your own vegetables before cooking/consumption is probably your best move.
Sure, it’s mammalian excreta, but it’s just a tiny amount.
When I had a bigger garden, I grew and ate my own broccoli. I’m here to tell you it’s nearly impossible to get all the caterpillars off. The little bestids are exactly the right shade of green to match the stem. Their survival move is to hold onto the stem with two pairs of rear legs and lean away at the perfect angle, so they look like little stems. If fools the birds, and it fooled me. I even shook the broccoli around in a sinkful of salty water. After two seasons of that, my broccoli growing days were at an end.
Snopes on the Chicken Fried Rat stories.
Snopes on the Human Finger in the Chili story
As you can see, neither is realistic.
I defended a restaurant in a case sorta like this. The customer said he bit down on a small rock in a salad, breaking his teeth.
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He couldn’t produce the rock as evidence
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Even if he could, I would have argued the rock was a “normal” thing to find in a salad, like chicken bone in a chicken, and thus he had no claim
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His dental records showed decay all over his teeth and crown damage on both sides of his mouth, top and bottom. I asked him how that happened, and he said, “the rock rolled around in my mouth.” :rolleyes:
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He told me he would be moving out of state soon, so I had the court move the trial date to a date after his move. He failed to show up for trial.
Victory! 
How is a rock “normal” in a salad?
Are you a rockbiter?
Total dick move. 
-FrL-
Ingredients are picked from the ground, where there are rocks.
I worked in a fast food restaurant and we had to separate rocks from beans before making refried beans, for example.
Actually, now that I think about it more, it was a chicken salad. My argument was that because he could not prove it was a rock, it very well could have been a chicken bone, which was normal. California law, generally, is that there is no liability for normal stuff in food. He had the burden of proving it was a rock and not a small fragment of chicken bone.
There is a famous set of tort cases where you learn that biting on a piece of shell or bone in a fish chowder in Boston isn’t actionable, whereas doing much the same thing in a restaurant in, say, Iowa might be. I suppose if I dragged out my old Prosser I might be able to look it up.
I’m not sure I get it. All that means is each state has its own rule of liability when it comes to finding objects in your food… or am I missing something?
Maybe that you’ll find more sea food in Boston than Iowa?
It means nothing of the kind.
It means that it’s all about what you expect to find in something. Someone with a lot of experience eating fish chowder would expect to find bones and shell pieces in it. So they might take more care eating it. That was the gist of the cases.
So… finding a booger in your McDonald’s hamburger isn’t actionable, because it’s something you should expect to find there.
My mom has busted two teeth on rocks in burritos in the last 30 years–once, a frozen grocery store burrito and once one from a fast-food place. In both cases, she wrote a letter to the company and they paid for the dental work. One paid quickly, the other hassled her a bit, but not to the point that she even needed a lawyer. She was able to produce the rock, and the damage in both cases was a single tooth pretty much smashed from biting down on a rock.
I guess the moral to this story is that if a company is really honestly at fault for actual harm, you don’t have to go to a lawyer first thing.
IANAL, but in order to sue for damages don’t you have to be, you know, damaged? Even for emotional distress claims, I would hope there has to be evidence that the trauma produced some sort of real harm. Are you unable to function normally due to this incident?
Yup. Anyone can sue for just about anything. But winning is something else again, and even if you do, you may not get nearly what you originally felt entitled to.
Oh, I see. Thanks.