This dead bat in a salad mix is your food safety nightmare come true
Two diners in Florida were munching on a prepackaged salad, perhaps enjoying the crispy crunch of lettuce, when they stumbled upon a strange ingredient. A weird crouton? No. Some ultra-GMO vegetable? You wish.
It was a bat. A dead bat. A dead bat was in their salad.
Fresh Express recently recalled some salad mixes sold at Walmart stores after the unlucky customers found a winged creature plopped among the leafy greens.
The pair had already started eating some of the salad before they found the bat. Not gross enough? Well, turns out the bat was in such deteriorated condition that when U.S. health officials tried to test it in the lab, they couldn't definitively determine if that bat had rabies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Saturday.
As if finding a decomposing creature in your food wasn't bad enough, the two people were advised to start post-exposure rabies treatment. Fortunately, the CDC said both people reported being in good health, and neither had any signs of rabies.
Apparently, it's extremely uncommon to get rabies by eating a rabid animal (pro tip!) and the virus doesn't survive very long outside of the infected animal, the health agency said.
Orlando-based Fresh Express on Saturday announced a precautionary recall of its 5-ounce Organic Marketside Spring Mix. The recalled salads came in a clear container with a best-if-used-by date of April 14. They were only distributed to Walmart stores in the southeastern region of the United States.
No other Fresh Express or Marketside salads were included in the recall. Fresh Express said that Walmart acted quickly to remove the spring mix product from its store shelves.
Experts from the CDC are working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Florida Department of Health to crack this particularly unsettling food safety case.
Maria Gallucci was a Science Reporter at Mashable. She was previously the energy and environment reporter at International Business Times; features editor of Makeshift magazine; clean economy reporter for InsideClimate News; and a correspondent in Mexico City until 2011. Maria holds degrees in journalism and Spanish from Ohio University's Honors Tutorial College.
