If You Notice This In Your Food, Throw It Away Immediately!

Once upon a time, we humans foraged mountains high and valleys low in order to appease our rumbling tummies. These days, all we need to worry about is scavenging the aisles of Walmart. And while that can be just as wild at times, you can bet that all the food in grocery stores is safe to eat, right? Well, this article will give you a lot of food for thought.

White Spots On Bananas

Have you ever noticed a weird white spot on your banana? So what are these strange little mounds and why should you be concerned? These little white growths are actually the nests of spiders.

And not just any spider: the Brazilian Wandering spider, AKA the world’s most venomous. Their bite is so toxic that it instantly attacks the nervous system, causing nausea, blurred vision, excruciating pain, and ultimately, death.

Rarely will you find them outside of their South American homeland, but due to their love of hiding in dark, moist places, they occasionally smuggle themselves between bananas, where they make journeys from the tropical regions they’re harvested in, to your local grocery store and eventually, your home.

In fact, in 2013 a British family had to evacuate their London home, as dozens of the deadly spiders sprouted from their bananas. 29-year-old Consi Taylor was midway through eating a banana when she spotted a suspicious white spot on the fruit.

She initially assumed it was mold but on closer inspection she was horrified to see tiny spiders dropping out onto the table and scurrying around. The Taylors fled to safety and had their home fumigated of these deadly spiderlings.

Luckily, even in their natural habitat, only 1 in 500 spiderlings of this species make it to adulthood, and their fangs aren’t strong enough to pierce human flesh until they mature, meaning any real danger was fairly unlikely.

Finding a nest of baby spiders is already scary, but imagine finding a more developed Brazilian wandering spider along for the journey. This horror story became a reality for a Staten Island family in 2016, as they returned from the grocery store with a little more than they’d bargained for.

Better check your bananas: from Dole (Costa rica) to Staten Island, New York by Ronald Coyne

The breed of this grizzly spider is unconfirmed, though being from South America, it’s likely one of those venomous Brazilian Wandering spiders, seemingly the only one of its brood that reached adolescence in its little egg-sac apartment.

And if that isn’t bad enough, imagine discovering a black widow just chilling in your broccoli. In 2018 Jacob Vaughn, a student from Ohio, stumbled across one eight-legged buddy in his broccoli.

Sneaky black widow spider tries to hide in man's broccoli by New York Post

While it’s true that the black widow’s venomous bite can lead to nausea, breathing difficulties, and muscle fatigue, thankfully they rarely result in death. So when life’s not only giving you lemons, but also venomous spiders in your veggies, you’ve gotta find the positives in life, right?

And in a twist of fate, this hellish tale did indeed have a happy ending. After alerting the local animal sanctuary, Jacob’s spidey friend was adopted and given the cute name ‘Broccoli’ by the Ohio Another Chance Sanctuary.

Finding a black widow in your broccoli is hardly a common occurrence, in fact you’re much more likely to find tiny bugs called aphids infesting your frozen broccoli, as the FDA actually allow up to 60 of them per 100 grams.

These little critters are notorious for infesting gardens and regularly make their way into your broccoli, homes, and eventually, stomachs! But that’s not half as bad as some of the other things people have found in their food.

Aboard The Orange

The timeless orange is the 5th most popular fruit in the world. And with its benefits ranging from improving skin and brain development, to allegedly even decreasing the risk of colon cancer, it’s no surprise we can’t get enough of them. But before you go buy a bucket-load of this miracle fruit, you might want to read Hassan Ali’s story first.

In 2014, Hassan purchased a pack of mandarins from the British grocery store, Sainsburys. In the midst of a mandarin binge, the 25-year-old tucked into his fourth orange, only to peel open a real-life horror story: a big, fat maggot with an entourage of eggs.

Maggots like this one are the spawn of fruit flies, and as their name might suggest, they mostly lay their eggs in and around fruit, or on other moist, organic materials. As their tiny larvae emerge from eggs, they continue to feed off the fruit until they eventually grow into the buzzing beasts we know as flies. Isn’t the circle of life beautiful?

While supermarket fruit undergoes rigorous inspections in order to meet consumer standards, occasionally anomalies like this do slip through, if a fruit fly is able to burrow into the fruit undetected.

Complete Life Cycle of the Fruit Fly by Insects Limited

But an anomaly is just how Hassan saw it, as even this nightmare wasn’t enough to put him off his favorite fruit. Having been awarded a Sainsbury’s gift card as compensation, he had plenty of cash to splash on his recreational orange addiction, though hopefully without the added protein.

Rest in Peanuts

The FDA, AKA the Food and Drug Administration, is the US institution responsible for maintaining food safety standards. So, it’s pretty alarming to find out that they actually approve of up to 11 rodent hairs in a typical jar of peanut butter.

Furthermore, official standards state that the average jar would need in excess of 30 insect fragments before it would pose a health risk: meaning you’re probably getting protein from more than just the peanuts!

And it’s health standards such as these that have shrouded the peanut industry in scandal. In 2008, the Peanut Corporation of America was shaken to the core when their peanut butter, under the brands of ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘Great Value’, rendered 714 people ill and 9 dead.

It all began when the CEO, Stewart Parnell, dismissed internal reports that his stock was contaminated with dust and rat droppings. As a result of this willing ignorance towards maintaining safety standards, Parnell knowingly sold a batch of peanut butter that ultimately proved to contain lethal amounts of salmonella.

All because, he claimed, he ‘couldn’t afford to lose another customer’. Ironically, this resulted in him losing 9 customers forever as they perished from their poisoned peanuts. In the end, however, justice reigned supreme. The Peanut Corporation of America went defunct, and Parnell was penalized with 28 years in prison in 2015.

But as far as peanut butter sandwiches are concerned, it seems not even the bread is safe from disconcerting traits. Beyond the flour and yeast, there’s an unexpected beast lurking in our loaves. And its name is ‘L-Cysteine’. Beneath the mask of this vague name lies an uncomfortable truth: human hair.

Surprisingly, our supermarket loaves are loaded with hair, as it is reported to strengthen the gluten and feed the yeast, which produces a reliable loaf and shortens the production time. The good news is that it’s mainly used in commercial bread production, so shopping locally from bakeries means you can avoid this tangle.

While L-Cysteine, an amino acid, is mostly sourced from cow horns, and duck and chicken feathers, The Guardian reports that human hair is also often used, mainly swept from Chinese hair salon floors and into our loaves.

First the hair’s boiled in concentrated hydrochloric acid and activated carbon, then treated by electrolysis, resulting in the usable amino acid. So, while it’s not as if you’ll find actual hairs in your bread, it still feels like a less deadly version of Sweeny Todd.

Extra-Terrestrial Tuna

Nothing that comes in a can is ever particularly fresh. And while the cheap price often reflects this lesser quality, finding an alien-like creature hidden in your can of tuna is just one step too far.

In 2015, British mom, Zoe Butler, found extra-terrestrial life inside her can of tuna or so it seemed. As she peeled open the can, a two-eyed, limbless, squidgy creature gawped back at her.

Stuart Hine, from London’s Natural History Museum, identified the creature as a young Cymothoa exigua, not an alien; but a tongue-eating parasite!

This creature enters fish through the gills and severs the blood vessels in its tongue, causing it to fall off. The Cymothoa attaches itself to the remaining stub and becomes the fish’s new tongue, feeding on its blood and mouth mucus.

Luckily for Zoe, her itsy-bitsy tongue-louse was already dead. Plus, she doesn’t have gills, so her tongue was left intact. Though its presence still left her speechless. While it’s possible that this creature was attached to a tuna fish’s tongue, how it’d make it into the can in one-piece defied explanation.

Princes, who manufactured the tuna can, think they may have an explanation. They think the creature may not be a tongue-louse, but instead a Megalopa; a small breed of crab that tuna prey on. The company suggests its legs were likely chopped off during the process, leaving the bug-eyed body behind.

Le Restaurant de Reddit

Reddit is a real melting-pot of the weird, wonderful, and everything in between. So, if you happen to find something gross lurking in your food, then there’s really no better place to share it! Let’s take a look at Reddit’s not-so-finest dishes.

First up is from user ‘aprilvalgreen’. As she tucked into a bag of flaming hot Cheetos, she came across an odd-shaped chip. Sharing it with Reddit to try and figure out what it was, the comment section suggested this was no chip at all.

Instead, this was a mouse that had been squished, baked, seasoned, and sealed into a pack of Cheetos.

And though there’s little to confirm this was the case, the fact the texture was described as ‘tough jerky’ leads us to assume this was no Cheeto.

And what could be worse than finding a mouse in your Cheetos? Perhaps finding a brain inside your Salsa Verde? Indeed, this one comes from user ‘Zapple27.’ While it’s unlikely that it actually was a brain, you can’t deny the sickening resemblance.

A few users in the comments theorized it might be a clump of xanthan gum; a kind of emulsifier used in manufacturing to stabilize ingredients and prevent them from separating. Others suspected a mother of vinegar, which is a gelatinous disk made up of cellulose and acetic acid, that can turn liquids into vinegar.

The next astounding find comes from user ‘AtomicCypher’. After treating their family to lobster Christmas lunch, they were shocked to find out that it’d been bulked up with an old sparkplug.

These devices are used in car engines to ignite fuel, but in this case its purpose was to sneakily increase the lobster’s weight, and hence, price. Shockingly, this has happened more than once, as fellow Redditor ‘cold_as_eyes’ discovered his lobster’s weight had also been tampered with by the weight of a spark plug.

Either there are some sneaky fishermen out there, or these lobsters need a tune-up from the mechanic!

Beetle Juice

When it comes to candy, we’re all aware of its high sugar content, but are there any other ingredients in there that we should be concerned with? Bluntly, yes.

Shellac is a type of resin and is used in candies, such as jellybeans, in order to achieve a hard, glossy outer shell texture. Though don’t be fooled by this alias, as the real identity of shellac is, in fact, bug poop.

Straight from the poop-shoot of the female lac bug that populates India and Thailand, the dung is scraped from tree branches, and through a treating, heating and cooling process is transformed into flat sheets of dried shellac.

This rear-end resin is thought to have been discovered in the 13th century and can be used as anything from wood varnish to cosmetics, to popular candies, such as Candy Corn, Hershey’s Whoppers, and Tootsie Rolls, to name a few. Apparently, one bug’s poop is another man’s candy.

And it turns out there’s more than just bug excretions in your candy too. The crushed up and boiled bodies of cochineal bugs also make their way in, hidden under the stage-name of ‘carmine’ or ‘natural red 4’.

This Aztec recipe is more than 5 centuries old and involves crushed cochineal bugs boiled and treated in chemical solutions, in order to extract their red coloring, which will be used as food dye. In fact, prior to 2009, Skittles actually included both shellac and carmine, meaning you weren’t so much tasting the rainbow as you were a dead bug and its poop!

Scary Dairy

Stealing someone else’s breastmilk sounds like a criminally abhorrent act, yet over the course of 6,000 years, we’ve turned cow’s milk into a global industry worth around $718 billion. Even with increasing veganism, numbers are on the up, as we globally squeezed more than 544 metric tons of milk in 2021.

But besides the slightly weird implications of drinking another animal’s motherly milk, are there any other reasons we may want to lay off dairy?

Cows only produce milk after they’ve had a baby, and with a billion-dollar industry riding on it, you can bet that farmers will do anything to get their daily squeeze. Repeatedly, artificially inseminating cows is common practice.

The cow’s frequent pregnancies can cause a condition known as mastitis. Not only is this painful for the cow; it causes their milk to become contaminated with blood and pus, but not in quantities that are always easy to detect and filter out. Mastitis milk is widely accepted, as the FDA allows for 750 million cells of pus per liter in the US, while in Australia, there is simply no limit.

And if that doesn’t leave a sour taste in your mouth, in 2016, it was reported that the Australian grocery store, Coles, had to remove milk from their shelves because it contained ‘too much’ cow poop.

Considering the proximity of cow butt to udder, plus the fact that these animals are hooked up to machines all day, it’s reasonable to assume this is a common occurrence. While pasteurization gets rid of harmful bacteria, it’s still pretty unnerving to think about what else we might be guzzling down with our cereal.

On the topic of harvesting animals’ reproductive materials, we also need to mention chickens, and the unfertilized eggs we love to devour. With the original, life-giving purpose of the humble chicken egg in mind, creations like the ‘long egg’ almost seem satanic.

This defilement of all things holy was designed in Denmark by the company Danaeg, with a view to make cutting perfectly uniform boiled eggs a breeze. In order to create this, manufacturers first separate the white from the yolk.

The white is cooked into a hallow, cylindrical tube, leaving a hole through the center where the yolk will be injected, in order to forge the appearance of a perfectly proportioned egg when sliced.

Something Smells Fishy

As long has man has existed, so has his love for alcohol. Our eternal booze-cruise is thought to date back to 7,000BC but as far as wine’s concerned, whether you’re a red kinda person, white, or rosé, there’s something fishy going on with all of them.

You probably assume your vino is made up of just fermented grape juice, right? Afterall that’s mostly true. Yet there’s a slippery ingredient often used in wine known as ‘isinglass’, which is actually code for a substance sourced from the dried swim bladders of fish.

It's gross but the worst part is that it isn’t even necessary. Its only purpose is to efficiently clarify the wine and make it less cloudy, something which most wine does by itself within a few days.

But with a $1.8 trillion industry riding on it, time certainly is money, so they prefer to speed it up the fishy way! This isn’t to say that all wines contain fish bladders, but many do, making it especially difficult for our vegan friends to get their next tipple.

Rest assured though, experts claim unfiltered wines without isinglass are still just as good to go, and honestly, after a few glasses, everything starts to look a little hazy anyway.

Nasty Nuggets

In 1963, humanity was blessed with the humble chicken nugget, thanks to agricultural scientist, Robert C. Baker. Since then, Americans have come to consume an annual average of around 2.3 billion nuggets, and that’s just from McDonald’s.

But is it really chicken that lies beyond the crispy batter? Or is it something more fraudulent, like the pink goop internet legend would have us believe?

McDonald’s have dismissed these rumors that tarnish their nugget’s good name. The goop in the viral image is reportedly either soft-serve ice cream, or a mix of scrap-meat and ammonium hydroxide used as filler for pet foods, depending on what sources you consult.

Meanwhile, McDonald’s claim their nuggets are made from 100% chicken breast, though when that stuff’s ground-up it hardly looks much better. However, not all nuggets are created equal.

Online sources claim that nuggets from other restaurants and retailers may have a few special ingredients in them, such as tendons, connective tissue, fat, and even crushed up bones. It means there’s a lot more of the chicken in most nuggets than you may’ve realized.

But as far as McDonald’s is concerned, perhaps it isn’t the pink goop or bony nuggets we should be worrying about. In 2020, British mom, Laura Arber bought her 6-year-old daughter some chicken McNuggets.

It seemed to be a happy meal, that was, until she began choking. As Laura induced vomiting in her daughter, she was shocked to see specks of blue in what came out. It soon became apparent that, alarmingly, a blue facemask had been baked into the nugget.

After returning to the restaurant, Laura claims she didn’t even receive an apology, but she was more concerned about whether they were going to continue serving their clearly contaminated stock.

Shockingly, they did. But it was 2020, and it was probably a fun Covid edition of their Happy Meal! The origin of this masked nugget remains a mystery, though it’s likely to have fallen off one of the factory workers during the meat grinding or nugget cutting process.

Tater Terror

Potatoes are definitely one of the most versatile resources we have. From chips, fries, and mash, to even generating electricity, there ain’t much a potato can’t do, which is exactly why you should be a little worried.

Potnonomicaphobia isn’t just a tongue twister, it’s the fear of potatoes. It turns out potatoes can be pretty deadly. If you ever come across a potato with green spots on it then it’s probably best to toss it in the trash. These green potatoes likely contain a poisonous chemical known as solanine.

And while death-by-potato is more likely to happen if someone throws one at your head, these little suckers are capable of other damage, from inducing nausea, vomiting, and headaches to a lovely case of diarrhea. But why?

It’s mainly to do with sun exposure. When exposed to sunlight, potatoes produce chlorophyll, a pigment which turns them green. And while this itself is completely harmless, it can also signal the presence of solanine.

Being over exposed to sunlight will only increase this, so proper storage is recommended, such as a cool, dark place. Sources suggest that physical damage, as well as notably high or low temperatures, can stimulate solanine production too.

The solanine levels are typically highest in the peel, but while peeling them can significantly reduce solanine content, studies suggest that much of the toxicity remains in the flesh, meaning a peeled potato may still cause illness, even when cooked. All this toxicity is purposeful though, as it protects the potato from insects and bacteria.

Finger Food

Stats show the USA produces around 6.4 billion pounds of frozen desserts per year. And while as a nation it seems we can’t keep our fingers off these delicious treats, certain people can’t keep their fingers out of them.

The year is 2005, and North Carolina resident, Clarence Stowers, stops by a Kohl’s Frozen Custard drive-thru. As he returns home and tucks into his frozen custard, he notices a lump in it, however, initially assuming it to be candy, he continues the feast.

Confused and unable to put his finger on the candy’s flavor or texture, he spits it out and investigates. It wasn’t long before a shriek escaped his body, as he discovered what appeared to be a freshly severed human finger in his dessert.

But it wasn’t just Clarence having a tough day, how about the guy who the finger belonged to? Well, that was 23-year-old Kohl’s employee, Brandon Fizer. As he tried to catch a falling bucket of custard, his hand got caught in the machine that beats the custard mix, where his index finger was swiftly trimmed at the first knuckle.

Amid the chaos, Clarence rolled up at the drive-thru window, where an unsuspecting employee served up a fresh scoop’o human flesh. Reports claim that Clarence took legal action against the frozen-dessert joint and kept Brandon’s finger in his freezer as legal evidence.

The outcome remains unknown, though I sincerely hope he eventually returned Brandon’s finger. This story gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, “don’t bite the hand that feeds you!”

If you are not disgusted enough after all these horrifying food-based revelations, you might want to read this article about what happens to your food when you're not looking! Thanks for reading!