Australian Salad Mix Is Full Of Salmonella And Spiders, And We Should Probably Never Eat It Again

Though salad may significantly improve your diet, lessen your risk of heart disease and thus potentially prolong your life, I’m also fairly sure it’s the direct result of a restaurant running out of food one night and tricking people into paying $20 for dirty old weeds they found out the back of the kitchen. I don’t care if you jazz it up with sauce and little pieces of toast, it’s a travesty to the name of food and should be unceremoniously tossed on the floor where it belongs.

Now, in the past 24 hours, a couple of distressing stories have confirmed what you, I, and Leslie Knope have always known: salad is terrible.

Yesterday evening, both Coles and Woolworths announced a national recall of the majority of their pre-packaged lettuce. Issued by the products’ supplier, Tripod Farmers, the recall comes as a result of 28 Victorians being diagnosed with salmonella poisoning, two of whom have since been hospitalised. After being determined as a common source for those affected, the products were tested for salmonella bacterium and came back positive. All packages of spinach, rocket, watercress, sorrell, baby cos, kale, and salad mix with a best before date prior to February 14 have been pulled from shelves across Woolworths, Coles, Bi-Lo and their subsidiary grocers.

The suppliers think this may have come as a result of a fertiliser which was used and are currently scrubbing the shit out of their entire premises. If you have any of the products at home, you should bring it back to the store, throw it in the bin, or return it from whence they came by burning it in a big dirty pit in the ground. If you’ve eaten this filth in the past few days, you should be on the lookout for diarrheoa, fever, headaches, stomach cramps, nausea, and vomiting. This can be especially serious for kids, the elderly, or those with compromised immune systems. It’s not yet known how Australia’s premier lettuce enthusiast and opposition leader Bill Shorten is coping with the news.

The answer now to Bill Shorten's "what's your favourite type of lettuce" question is "the one without salmonella" pic.twitter.com/mqVfkRIcf1

— Mick (@Mi7k) February 4, 2016

While this is all terrible enough on its own, it was last night made worse by a post on the Woolworths Facebook page. Here, a woman from Sydney’s southern suburbs shared a video of what appears to be an enormous spider crawling directly out of her nightmares and into her Italian Syle Salad Mix.

“Is this what’s actually behind the ‘salmonella’ callbacks?” she wrote. The video’s now been viewed more than 3 million times and shared by more than 65,000 people.

Woolworths responded immediately to the post and said they were “very concerned”. “[We] take incidents like this very seriously. Please let us know your phone number and state in a private message so that we can follow this up with you ASAP.”

Though it’s not yet known if the video’s legitimate — the supplier is yet to respond — this isn’t the first time this has happened. Earlier this month, a Melbourne woman found a huntsman spider and a “decent sized spider egg sac” in a bag of grapes. The same thing happened last year to a British woman who found a pregnant black widow, believed to have traveled all the way from Brazil. It was around this time that another British family found a Brazilian wandering spider — the world’s deadliest breed which can kill you within an hour of a bite — laying hundreds of eggs in their recently purchased bunch of bananas.

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