A horrified diner bit into part of a human finger, complete with its nail, when she tucked into a bowl of chilli in a California fast-food restaurant, health officials said on Thursday.
The woman was so sickened by the grisly discovery on Tuesday that she began vomiting. Police were summoned to take the offending digit into custody, said Joy Alexiou of the Santa Clara county health department.
”She was in the process of eating her chilli when she bit into something, and when she took a closer look it appeared to be a human finger,” she said.
”It was the tip with the whole nail on it. It was very emotionally disturbing for her and she immediately threw up when she saw what she had bitten into,” she added.
Staff at the restaurant put the finger food into a freezer as police and public health officers were called to the branch of the global fast-food chain south of San Francisco.
After taking inventory of the digits of the restaurant staff and finding that none of them had lost a fingertip, the finger was taken into police custody and to the local coroner’s office for examination.
”We have no idea at this point who it belonged to,” Alexiou said. ”It was not from any of the staff.”
The restaurant was shut down for several hours while officials impounded the chilli and its ingredients but was reopened after a new, unfingered batch was made from fresh ingredients.
The coroner’s office was on Thursday trying to take a fingerprint from the well-cooked finger and was launching a ”trace-back investigation” to see if it landed in the chilli pot after being delivered in canned or pre-packed ingredients shipped to the restaurant, she said.
Wendy’s marketing director for Santa Clara County, Steve Jay, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the restaurant is working with authorities to find out how the finger poked its way into the chili.
”We’re fully cooperating,” he said.
Meanwhile, health officials said it is unlikely that the renegade digit will pose a health risk to the woman who chewed it or to other diners as the chilli was cooked at a sufficiently high temperature to kill bacteria.
”We’ve never come across anything like this before. This is the stuff of an urban myth, not of reality,” one official said on condition of anonymity. — Sapa-AFP