Larva and stinking eggs in Sainsbury's Mandarin

Hasan Ali, a 25 year old from West Yorkshire, was sharing a bag of Taste the Difference Sainsbury's Mandarin oranges with his colleagues, when he broke open a fruit that was home to a wriggling maggot and hundreds of eggs. The smell was appalling.

He told The Mirror: "The smell was horrible, disgusting. It smelt like really strong rotting food. I looked inside and there was some kind of maggot or larvae and millions of little eggs."
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The fruit had been bought from the Sainsbury's at Manchester Piccadilly station. He contacted the supermarket via Twitter and sent a Tweet to Defra. Sainsbury's apologised and offered him a £10 gift card.

It told the Daily Star: "Like all our products, citrus fruit is checked at several points throughout the supply chain, but due to the very nature of fresh produce, occasionally incidents such as this may occur."

Creepy Crawlies

Ali wasn't too distressed by the experience, although he said that one of his colleagues had eaten a Mandarin from the bag and felt a bit queasy. It's certainly not a creepy crawlie we'd look forward to finding in our fruit, but it may not be the worst.

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Perhaps the most gross thing to find would be a cockroach. These don't tend to show up terribly often in supermarkets and their food, but can be the downside of choosing the wrong takeaway. In August last year we reported on the Leeds pizzeria which was ordered to pay £2,000 after a customer found a cockroach baked into the crust of his pizza.

A bigger risk in a supermarket is a deadly spider. We reported earlier this week on a Brazilian Wandering Spider which had been delivered to a customer with his Waitrose groceries and had been nestling in among the bananas. The enormous spider can kill people with a single bite - and deliver a nasty lingering death from paralysis. Fortunately the customer spotted it in time and a pest controller from Waitrose caught it and destroyed it. Unsurprisingly the shopper didn't fancy returning home in a hurry.

In the US, finding a black widow spider lurking among your grapes is alarmingly common - about 10 people find them every year. Fortunately, in the UK it's much less normal, because they have to travel so far to get here. The last time they were found in a bunch of grapes was in a 2002 incident in Tesco.

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