A Florida couple were happily munching on their prepackaged lettuce when they stumbled across an unlikely ingredient. A dodgy crouton? Nope. A dead bat. In their salad. Yes, you read that right.
The gruesome discovery prompted Fresh Express— the company behind the salad mixes— to issue a regional recall for bagged salad sold at Walmart stores and an investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
The unlucky pair had already started biting into their greens from a bag of “Organic Marketside Spring Mix” when they noticed the decomposed winged creature. They immediately alerted authorities, who sent the bat to a CDC rabies lab for testing (bats in the US sometimes carry this disease).
If that weren’t gross enough, the animal was in such advanced stage of decomposition that the CDC lab couldn’t determine for sure whether it had rabies, the CDC said in a statement published over the weekend.
Transmission by eating an infected animal is “extremely uncommon”, the CDC said, but because it is not null the two people were recommended for post-exposure rabies treatment.
Fortunately, the couple seem to be in good health with no apparent sign of rabies.
As a precautionary measure, Fresh Express issued a limited recall for its organic spring mix sold in clear container with a best-used date of 14 April.
In a statement, the Orlando-based company said it “takes matters of food safety very seriously and rigorously complies with all food safety regulation.”.
The CDC advised customers who may have already purchased the recalled product to “discard and not consume it.”
However, the agency specified people who had eaten the salad and not found “animal material” were not at risk and could contact Fresh Express for a refund.
