Broken plate shards in a pasta dish at a restaurant.

Black beetle in a prepared salad from Trader Joe’s.

When I was a teenager I made my Dad a pot of homemade beef barley soup and when he looked into the bowl he saw lots of little worms. I had never cooked with barley before. I was mortified haha. He ate a few spoonfuls anyway and told me it was the best soup he had ever eaten. Not weird but gross

Also on the gross side, I was waiting tables in a fairly upscale restaurant. After the house salad was given, I stopped back to check on the table only to find the wife of the couple white as a sheet. She had found a used bandaid in her salad! Came off the son (kid) of the chef/owner. Comped the entire meal - to go.

When I was young I found bugs in a Hershey bar bought in a shop in Manhattan. I wrote the company and they sent a rep to the shop and found the same. They sent me a whole box of Hershey goodies.

I found an entire latex glove in an enchilada once.

Eating out at a popular steak house I found a piece of blue glass in the middle of a baked sweet potato. It was about an inch and a half long and ridged like from the top rim of a canning jar. The potato apparently grew around it.

Barbara, a used bandaid was mentioned a few times on the radio. Gross!

Some weird stuff out there.

No big surprises here but one time I did find a slug staring up at me in my salad, it rose to the top once the vinaigrette was added. But since this salad was from our own garden it wasn't too bad of a shock.

Another one was while eating chili at a Tex/Mex restaurant. My spoon bought up what looked like a stick or tree twig. After calling over the waiter he said "oops, the chef ladled into my bowl a cinnamon stick which was one of their secret ingredients". Since that time I've added a cinnamon stick to my homemade batches of chili (but removed it before serving).

I purchased chocolate bark candy, Bark Thins. (see link) Opened it to find spider web type material..... woven by worms.....still alive and thriving....like this exactly!

Warning, many of you will not appreciate this...

While in the Navy, I was in the Philippines for many months. When not on duty, I went into town and did a bunch of beer consumption. In that situation one eats whatever is available. Lots of BBQ offered. Tasted good to me, then asked what kind of meat it was. Dog.

A purple liquid (grape soda?) in an unopened bottle of Pepsi that came out of a dispenser.

^^^ Jim, was it a Chow Chow?

Or a hot dog?

Lechon Fido! I'd rather have that then Balut!

I made sure all of the Lechon I ate in Manila resembled a chicken or suckling pig!

At a nice dinner in a restaurant to commemorate a special occasion, my youngest found a large insect in her salad. The establishment did not comp us or apologize.

I've found assorted bugs in produce I've bought at the store but I wash them off.

One time while visiting WA state, I had to go buy a famous WA state apple. I started to eat it and soon after declaring that it tasted the same as regular apples, a worm popped out of it, alive. Eww.

Last night I opened a new bag of jasmin rice. Upon pouring the called for amount into the pot I saw something strange in the rice. It was a dried pinto bean. I scooped it out and threw it away. I thought, at least it was just a pinto bean.

I once worked with a person who frequently ate lunch from a restaurant next door. She was having digestive trouble for a few days and quite uncomfortable. She finally passed what she said appeared to be a plastic sandwich bag! She felt better after that. I never ate there after that incident. They eventually went out of business. Perhaps my coworker was not the only one something like that happened to.

While eating in Chinatown in Honolulu, I found a fish swimming in my soup. Couldn’t move past that course!

Not me, but a friend found a tooth in his meal at a local Chinese restaurant. That ruined that place for me. I couldn’t unthink it.

Terilyn, I spent a couple of weeks in China on business. At one dinner, we were served soup with brine shrimp swimming in it. I declined.

Several years ago I found what I thought was a bullet in the Thanksgiving turkey. After the holiday I took it back to the store and they said it was an arrowhead and gave ma a full refund. We ate the turkey anyway.

I never understood why no one thought anything about teeny snails in the tap water in your drinking glass at various restaurants in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. (1970's)

A sports bar type restaurant in Kahului on Maui was famous for their bean soup. Towards the end of the lunch hour/start of dinner time, I ordered the soup and discovered it was 90% salt. Management checked in the kitchen and reported that a box of salt had fallen into the pot and been retrieved...obviously not soon enough! No charge for my replacement lunch. (No soup either.)

Found a pretty good sized cockroach in my main course in a local Asian restaurant several years ago. I don't remember what the dish was, but the sauce was about the same color as the roach. I had already eaten about half of the dish, so I refused when they offered to replace it. So they comped it instead. I never went back there, and they closed soon after. A shame, until that incident it was my favorite place to eat, I loved their food. But after that I never could help but wonder how many 'bugs' I may have eaten there, unknowingly.

Rusty

When we were first married, DH picked up Italian sausage to grill. When I got home, he asked "how fussy are you about what you eat?" There was a band aid in the sausage. Yikes!

I found a rubber band in a taco at Del Taco. Compared to some of the other stories here, not too gross. Lol.

When I was a kid, I found a couple of pieces of twisted metal shards in a store bought cupcake.

Another time my mother and I were eating raisins from a box that had been in the cupboard for awhile (evidently) and then looked in it and it was full of little white worms. That was the last time I purposely ate a raisin.

Rustys post reminded me of an event. Our daughter was starting junior high. Thought it would be a great outing if I took her and 4 other 12 year olds to local restaurant. We ordered and they brought out huge bowl of tortilla chips. Several roach bugs started coming out of the bowl. I had no idea how much 5 twelve year old girls could scream. It was a horror when roach bugs started crawling all over the table. We left immediately.

In a cafeteria in a college in Trinidad I found a Trinidad-ian quarter in my rice and beans.

Ew, I found a bandaid, too. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and there was a bandaid in the green beans. I stopped eating.

I pulled a sealed plastic container of cinnamon sugar pecans from Trader Joe's out of my pantry for holiday baking and it was full of writhing worms. It went directly into the trash unopened and I've never purchased that item again.

Shattered glass. The hostess dropped the hot dish on the floor and it broke in half. She "rescued" the food and served it to her guests anyway. I saw it on my first forkful and did not eat it, of course. Other guests stopped eating immediately.

When I was working in Manila back in the early 90s I went to a KFC and while I was waiting to order I was watching cock roaches crawling over the chicken in the warmer.

No thanks, I'd prefer to be surprised.

Flies in salad.at the chow hall on base at Davis-monthan. That's when I bought a microwave and some canned soup to eat in my dorm room.

Local Chinese place would find bites of steel in my food. It would happen on and off. I finally took it back to show them and they refunded.my money and said it looked like part of the steel.wool they used to scrub the pans with. Gag. Haven't been back.

I bought some fresh cod at a local grocery store chain years ago. I checked it while it was baking in the oven. There were some live worms crawling out of the fish. I'm glad I saw them before it was fully baked, but I would rather have not had that experience.

Found a piece of a plastic bag once in something, I don't recall what exactly, but think it was a sauce of some sort. I figured it was a packaged sauce they had used rather than homemade and someone cut the end off and it landed in the sauce. I sent it back of course.

I also found a tough inedible corn husk wrapped around the tamales in a dish I ordered. It was nearly impossible to bite through or chew. Who knew you are supposed to remove it before eating. :-)

I got some KFC about 48 yrs go and it had a large cancer in it. When working in restaurants the people found earrings and nails in their food. At my first job the owners son's would fool around in the bakery and they found rubber bands in the bread.

^^^ Bingo - I think you win the prize Joann with the KFCancer.

Ewww, I've been lucky. Worst thing I've found was a ladybug beetle in my salad. It was alive, so I figured well at least the lettuce was organic!

A button battery in a tuna rice casserole that I made. I don't know if it was in the rice, the tuna, the cream of mushroom soup or even from my house. The battery was intact so I spit it out and kept eating.

I forgot about worms, or fruit fly maggots. When I was kid in S. CA, was eating a peach, got down to the pit and it had a bunch of maggots in it. I've never been able to eat fruit whole after that.

I just remembered the time I drank ants. I was on an Outward Bound trip and there was a container of apple juice sitting on the ground. I was dying of thirst so I chugged it down, Then I put my hand to my mouth and it was full of ants. I was literally picking dead ants out of my teeth.

Drink from a local drive through that had several feet of cash register tape beneath the ice. When I took it back to the restaurant, the staff started laughing. I wrote to corporate and complained but never received an answer. They tore the building down a couple of years later and I cheered.

I personally prepared a pan of broccoli wit a side of green worms. The broccoli was from our garden. I checked on the progress of the broccoli that was being cooked and saw the broccoli moving. GAG. Needless to say, we have some frozen veggie that night. Now oI examine all the broccoli that comes from the garden for those green worms that hide in the broccoli

Some kind of metal bolt in a 6 oz glass bottle of Coke - my breakfast on morning's after in the 70's.

OK, Joann. I'll 'bite'. What does cancerous tissue in meat LOOK like?

Good lord, almost every one of the above posts made me gag.

When I was first married, I found a sliver of wood, larger than a toothpick in a hotdog.

At my parents place one time-Mom had picked up a store made pizza for lunch-between the pizza and the cardboard under were ear wigs-loads of them! Nope-not eating that.

While having lunch at an upscale restaurant for business, about halfway through my bowl of pasta, I nearly broke a tooth on a good-sized piece of heavy gauge wire. Free lunch for me, but I was done.

Oh, those broccoli worms. Those I've seen are exactly the same color as the broccoli and hide so easily. I haven't cooked broccoli for years without giving it a salt water soak in the sink first....anything alive comes right out ;0)

I really can't think of much interesting that I've found in food....an occasional live thing in something organically grown can't be that unusual. Many, many years ago though someone gave me a box of either aplets or cotlets, and when opened there were some moth type looking things inside. Alive. I'd liked them up to that point and never ever have eaten another. I did see on the news just this month that they are closing after about 100 years in business. Not moth related. Wishing them no ill, but I'm sure its been 30 years since I've had one of their products.

Living near the coast, we eat a lot of seafood that we've either harvested ourselves, bought directly from a boat, or sometimes a seafood store. Very rarely the grocery store. I did buy some very expensive tiny oysters that were not much bigger than a 25 cent piece at a chain grocery, sold on ice - I was really looking forward to them. As they started to heat in the pan, they started to pop open and explode like little geysers. I know thats not typical oyster cooking behavior and threw the whole pan contents out. And have never again bought 'fresh' seafood from a chain style grocery ;0)

Not exactly out of place, but I think it's odd that I have not once, but three times found little pearls in my oysters, especially since I probably have oysters just three or four times a year.

the cancer looked like a small brain from what I remember of it. Chicken Cancer video

Thanks (I think) Joann! Yuck.

A leg in your hand puts a tumor in your mouth?