We hope you're not eating right now, because the latest food recall is sure to make you retch. No, we're not talking E. coli or listeria: Fresh Express packaged salad mix is being recalled because a pair of unlucky diners found a bat in their greens.
Yes. A salad bat.
Mashable reports that Fresh Express, which is available at Walmart stores nationwide, recalled a selection of its salad mixes after the incident.
But wait, just to be clear, people found a bat in their salad mix. To make matters worse, the couple had already been chowing down on the green stuff when they found the unwelcome extra ingredient lurking in their salad.
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Anyone brave enough to check their bagged salad should look to make sure it's Fresh Express' Organic Marketside Spring Mix before overreacting and eating nothing but Soylent (wait, on second thought...). The FDA is recalling salads distributed in the Southeastern U.S. According to the FDA's recall site, the questionable mixes are in a clear container with production code G089B19 and best-if-used-by date of April 14, 2017, and UPC code 681131328975. Walmart removed all packaged salads from the same lot at the location that sold the bat salad.
"The recall was necessitated when Fresh Express was notified that extraneous animal matter was allegedly found in a single container of the salad," the FDA statement reads. "Out of an abundance of caution, all salads manufactured in the same production run are being recalled."
According to the Centers for Disease Control, after the "extraneous animal matter" arrived for testing, the bat was "in such deteriorated condition" that health officials couldn't even subject it to tests for rabies. But the CDC adds that contracting rabies by ingestion is extremely rare since the virus cannot survive outside of a host. The couple that reported finding the bag has begun post-rabies exposure treatments, however. Both are in good health and have not reported any symptoms. The government organization adds that no one has reported additional instances of bat-laced salads, though we've lost our appetites and can't imagine ever looking at a bowl of salad the same way ever again.
If you do have one of the salads in your fridge right now, you can call the Fresh Express Consumer Response Center at 1-800-242-5472 from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. EDT or return it to Walmart for a full refund.