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Health

Someone Found a Dead Fucking Bat in Their Packaged Salad

Fresh Express has recalled some of its organic spring mix thanks to extra organic material.
Gunter Marx Photography / Getty Images

In the annals of food recalls, this one takes the cake: Fresh Express has recalled a batch of prepackaged salads after one customer found a fucking decomposing bat in their lettuce. Two people ate some of the salad before they found the dead bat in the clear, five-ounce container of organic greens bought at a Florida Walmart store.

The salad in question was Marketside brand Organic Spring Mix, which was distributed exclusively to Walmart stores in the southeastern US. Fresh Express is voluntarily recalling salads manufactured in the same production run "out of an abundance of caution" after they were notified that "extraneous animal matter" was found in one container. The company notes that no other Marketside salads and no Fresh Express salads are included in the recall and Walmart has pulled the recalled salads from its shelves and is offering refunds. The dead fucking bat somehow made it into the container despite controls that help prevent "field material" from getting mixed in with raw food as well as washing and filtration systems and visual inspections.

It was the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that identified the animal matter as a goddamn dead bat. The CDC says the bat was sent to its rabies lab but it was decomposed enough that they weren't able to say for sure whether the bat had the disease (the CDC does acknowledge that it's extremely uncommon to get rabies from eating a rabid animal). Florida health officials say there isn't any sign that either of the two people who dined on bat salad have been exposed to rabies and they appear to be in good (physical) health. Still, the CDC recommended that they get rabies treatment just in case, and the agency will investigate the matter with the Food and Drug Administration. If you ate the recalled salad and didn't find any "extraneous animal matter," you're fine and you don't need to call your health department.

This news is not an excuse to stop eating salad (sorry, man) but if you're freaked out, maybe dump the contents of the package into a bowl to rule out the presence of any rotting animal corpses.

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