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The ten weirdest things found in food
  • In September 13-year-old Robyn Hills from Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, had a horrible shock when she took a sneaky swig from a 2ltr bottle of Lidl cola. Something weird and rubbery touched her lip, and when she peered into the bottle she was sure she could see a human finger. In the end it turned out to be a shredded surgical glove. It's less stomach-churning, but it still isn't a brilliant addition to a bottle of coke.
  • This summer it was the turn of Manminber Singh, a 37 year-old burger fan, who fancied a chicken burger at Burger King in Darlington in County Durham. He fancied it a great deal less after taking his first bite - when he came face to face with a slug.
  • Around the same time, the former owner of Munchies takeaway in Leeds was ordered to pay a court £2,000, after a customer found a cockroach baked into the crust of a pizza bought there. The restaurant was closed down and ordered to clean up, and is now under new management.
  • A couple of months earlier, Jenna Murray, a 29-year-old model from Camden in North London had a face-to-face encounter with a critter in her dinner. She was tucking into a 'Delicious and Nutritious' smoked mackerel, new potatoes and beetroot dish from Marks & Spencer when she came across a one-inch-long dead beetle.
  • Sometimes you have to look a little closer: in October Hayley O'Shea, a 39-year-old accountant from Bournemouth in Dorset, was cooking dinner for her daughters when she noticed something odd about the pasta. She had opened a new packet and poured the pasta into the saucepan when she spotted hundreds of tiny black things. She drained the pasta, took a closer look, and discovered it had been crawling with weevils.
  • Creepy crawlies aren't the only thing to watch out for either. In September last year Katie Crabtree, a 31-year-old mother-of-two from Stockport, bit into a dead, sliced, rodent tucked into a Tesco sandwich. It was lurking in a BLT sandwich and she mistook it for a bit of burned bacon. It was only on closer inspection that she spotted the fur.
  • It's not just creatures lurking within food either. This February, Marie Doyle, a 24-year-old from Sittingbourne in Kent, was unwrapping a pre-cooked chicken for her Sunday dinner when she discovered something that made her stomach turn: there was a blue plaster stuck to the chicken.
  • That same month Tony Hinds and his fiancee Lauren Gooch found something even more grim in their packet of Tesco Finest Pork and Chive sausages: a human tooth complete with filling. Tesco said in a statement that it was confident that the tooth was not in the sausage when it arrived in the store, as the supplier used metal detectors on everything leaving the factory - which would have been set off by the tooth.
  • One really odd find came to light as a man was prosecuted for tampering with food on the shelf of a branch of Tesco. A drug addict had been trying to hide his addiction and find somewhere to hide a bloodied syringe in the store. He pushed it through the wrapper of a loaf of bread. It was found by a mother, whose 2-year-old daughter was already tucking into a sandwich from the loaf.
  • But possibly the most well-known weird thing found in food in the UK was the mouse found in September 2010, baked into a loaf of bread, of which several slices had already been used. This hit the headlines because it is one of the very few instances where the shopper received compensation - after the case was heard by Oxford Crown Court.

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