Strange but true: Foreign bodies Pre-packaged food sometimes comes with with added bite, says Paul Sieveking THE odd caterpillar or foreign object inevitably finds its way into food; but sometimes more bizarre things turn up in kitchens as meals are prepared. Patricia Henderson, for instance, put her hand in a bag of Sainsbury's mixed herbs last month and felt something large and mobile, which turned out to be a live toad the size of her fist. Mrs Henderson, 42, bought the salad at the Whitley Bay, Tyneside, store and kept it in the fridge over the weekend before opening it on Monday. The bag's contents had been shipped in from Africa and packed in Britain by suppliers to Sainsbury's before arriving at its store, where it was kept in a refrigerated compartment. "We have screening procedures which should have spotted something like this - especially at the weighing stage," a spokesman said. Janet Pillow bought a bag of broccoli at Tesco in Whitstable, Kent, and sliced a live, poisonous, seven-inch water snake in half when she opened it on June 19, 1996, which happened to be during National Broccoli Week. And in April 1994, a dead bat was found in a pan of frozen broccoli in Alfriston, Derbys. In 1993, Ken Cope from Whitney, Oxon, found a bone from a child's hand in a packet of pistachio nuts; and the following year Ken Chenowerth from Bristol (who had a snake phobia) found rattlesnake bones in a packet of peanuts. In 1988, a bag of peanuts in Essex contained the molar of a Chinaman. Lynn Wulf, an inspector for a consumers' affairs department, found half an inch of human finger in a bandage when she opened a can of mushroom stems at her house in Long Island in April 1993. In the same month, a nurse, Rosemary Pothecary, bought a salad in a sandwich bar in Tottenham Street, central London. Back home, she was chewing the final forkful of shredded cabbage when she bit on the top of a human thumb. Earlier in the sandwich bar, a Mr Campos had been preparing coleslaw when he cut off half his thumb and was rushed to hospital. No one thought of checking what had happened to the missing digit. A third finger turned up in 1993 when a teenager in Ilford heated up a Tyne brand hotpot and bit into something hard which turned out to be half a human finger. In March 1996, David Dean was fixing a snack at home in Tampa, Florida, when he spotted part of a finger lying among the slices of ham which his wife had bought at their local supermarket. It is not all bad news. In 1992, Levent Süner bought Norwegian mackerel in some unspecified Turkish town and found a yellow stone in one of the fish which turned out to be 4.5 grams of 24-carat gold. The wife of a Sioux Indian, Benny Left Hand, was even luckier. In 1985 she was cutting up a chicken in her kitchen in the Standing Rock reservation when she felt something hard in the chicken's gut, which turned out to be a nugget of gold about 28 grams in weight. Li Yunzhong, a Chinese farmer from Hunan province, found a 1.18 carat uncut diamond in the gizzard of a chicken he was preparing for dinner in September 1985. He sold it for 950 yuan (approximately £300) or three times the average annual income for a peasant. It was suggested that the bird picked up the gem from paths spread with gravel from a diamond mine. And in November that year, Ken Holdaway of Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, found a nine carat gold ear-ring in an egg. An Italian woman thought a tiny stone had become lodged between her teeth as she ate spaghetti in a Rome restaurant in 1996. However, a visit to the dentist revealed a raw diamond worth £2,000, which she planned to mount in a ring. How it got there was a mystery How it changed my life:yech,,,, i hope none would happen to me, but it would be nice to have those diamonds or what not heh. :p You can join Unsolved Mysteries and post your own mysteries or interesting stories for the world to read and respond to Click hereScroll all the way down to read replies.Show all stories by Author: 40145 ( Click here )
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