“Waiter, what is this fly doing in my soup?”
“Well, sir, I think it’s doing the backstroke.”
This old saw has stuck around partly because it’s so common for insects to show up in food and for people to accidentally eat them. It may not be particularly pleasant, but still, it’s fairly ordinary.
A fly gets in your soup. You touch lips with an addled wasp that is slurping the dregs of a soft drink. You eat a few no-see-ums while riding your horse or your bicycle at dusk. A bite of your apple reveals half a worm. It happens.
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But how would you feel about finding a finger in your chili?
The mind boggles at the customer-waiter repartee equivalent to the aforementioned fly-in-soup scenario.
As daily and broadcast media have more than adequately reported, a woman in San Jose, California, recently found a four centimetre piece of finger in a bowl of chili she bought at a Wendy’s fast food outlet. It wasn’t her finger, nor was it that of anyone else in the restaurant or its food supply chain.
In fact, after about a month of investigation by police and a $100,000 reward offered by Wendy’s, all are stumped about the identity of the digit’s owner.
Could one misplace a finger lopped off somewhere beyond the first knuckle? One with a longish fingernail, according to reports? That’s only one of the confounding aspects of the case.
The chili eater at first threatened to sue Wendy’s, but dropped that idea after it was reported she had a history of filing lawsuits against rich corporations.
Then another woman who lost a finger in a leopard attack (she was from Las Vegas, enough said) thought the finger might be hers. Fingerprint evidence proved otherwise.
At time of writing, the chili-eating woman had been charged with attempted larceny in connection with the incident, although police stopped short of suggesting the finger was planted. Headlines in the more lurid press suggested the woman had bitten off more than she could chew.
The food safety issues of the incident are less relevant now that suspicious circumstances and motivations have emerged. Certainly we can be grateful that the finding of a finger in fast food is sufficiently unusual to warrant extensive coverage.
The truth is, the biggest hazards to food safety are things you can’t see Ñ nasty bacteria that slip down much easier than flies and fingers.
The message we can extract from this? Wash your hands often. And count your fingers.
