The Time One Woman Found A Turtle In A Folgers Package
People have been known to find some pretty weird stuff in their food. Some have been lucky, like the Virginia man who found a $20 bill sandwiched in his McDonald's cheeseburger (via WTVR 6 News), or the Washington woman who found a pearl worth $600 in a clam at a restaurant (via KOMO News). Unfortunately, many others have had a much more disturbing, and sometimes even gross, experience. In 2015, a Detroit area woman found a poisonous black widow spider in a container of grapes from Walmart, while a couple of years earlier, a youngster from another town in Michigan found part of a finger in his Arby's sandwich.
And then there was the Iowa woman who probably had never worried a day in her life about finding foreign objects in her food, but was snapped (pun intended) back to reality when she found a dead baby snapping turtle in her package of Folgers coffee. What gives?!
The turtle may have been a stowaway from Louisiana
Marjorie Morris of Ainsworth, Iowa, was going about her day in November of 2005 when she poured a two-pound package of freeze-dried Folgers coffee into another container and found a dead baby turtle inside. Morris had been using the same coffee to make her morning cup of joe for a month before she found the turtle, as reported by News 19. The 77-year-old did contact Procter & Gamble Co., then owners of Folgers, but didn't seem too concerned about the incident. "I thought it was a toy at first," Morris said, adding that she was grateful it wasn't another type of reptile: a snake, per the New York Post.
The dead turtle was sent to Procter & Gamble to be examined. Since one of the major Folgers plants in New Orleans had faced heavy damage just a few months earlier during Hurricane Katrina, one possible explanation presented was that the turtle "washed in" and contaminated the coffee. "We believe that this is an isolated incident," a Procter & Gamble spokeswoman said at the time (via NBC News).
News of the turtle's untimely death hit the Technodrome Forums, which unites fans of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and its members had plenty of opinions to share about the incident. "Another reason why I don't drink coffee," wrote one user, while another chimed in with some humor, writing, "Poor lil turtle... It musta had KILLER caffeine jitters."