8 of the Wildest Things Customers Have Found in Their Fast Food

Apparently scoring an Olympic gold medal is easier than we thought. At least that was the case for a woman in California who found one earlier this week in an empty McDonald’s bag that was dumped on her property, The Washington Post reports. No, it wasn’t part of one of McDonald’s many Olympics promotions from over the years. It was, in fact, 2020 U.S. Women’s Volleyball Team champion Jordyn Poulter’s medal, which she had reported missing months earlier. The medal is now in its rightful place around Poulter’s neck, and Poulter gave the woman who found it a nice little cash reward for returning it.

Back in 2014, a Maryland woman found an unexpected package in her Sonic drive-thru order when unpacking meals for her kids. According to The Frederick News-Post, Carla McFarland reached into her own fries and pulled out a small bag of weed. Apparently it belonged to an employee who had it in their apron pocket and it slipped out into the bag. That employee was unfortunately fired instead of lauded for trying to help conjure the munchies in customers.

It was pretty traumatizing for Brittani Paulhamus when she first found a full chicken head in her to-go order of wings from a restaurant in Pennsylvania. “I bit into a wing and you know, all was fine. I picked up the second wing, and all of a sudden, I’m like, ‘Why is the shape weird?’” Paulhamus told TODAY. “I turned it and whenever I seen the beak and the eye, I threw it and I screamed.” The restaurant put out a statement profusely apologizing, but Paulhamus mostly laughed it off. We’ll see who’s laughing if she comes across another chicken head.

From chopping accidents to ice cream machine snafus, the food world is full of lopped-off digits, but finding one in a hamburger? That’s enough to put anyone off their beef. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened to a woman in Bolivia. The New York Post translated a report from Bolivian local media explaining the incident. Per the Post, the woman ordered a burger from Bolivian chain Hot Burger, took a few bites, and suddenly “felt something hard in her mouth.” She took a look at the foreign object and it was unmistakably a finger. The chain traced it back to a meat grinding incident in which a worker lost two fingers—the other finger may still be at large.

The first instance on record of a knife being spotted in a Subway sandwich was in 2008. CBS News reported that a man got a 12-inch cold cut sandwich, and when he bit into it, he chomped down right onto the handle of a serrated knife. Luckily he avoided biting into the blade, but still reported stomach issues from eating the knife-tainted loaf. (I guess you never really know what’s in Subway’s bread.)

More recently, a handful of posts on TikTok show this is becoming more and more common (or at least some kind of weird hoax trend). One user even admitted to being the sandwich artist who left at least one of them behind.

“Who Could Relish Bullets in a Hot Dog?” the 2004 Los Angeles Times headline read. The article that followed detailed the story of a woman in Irvine, California, who bit into one bullet and fully swallowed another that was lodged inside a Costco hot dog. (How dare the Costco dog betray anyone in this way!) Investigations came up fruitless—to this day, no one knows how the bullets got there. As for the woman who swallowed one, she was unharmed and took care of things, ahem, “naturally.”

There are plenty of tales of animals meeting their demise in a loaf of bread or a fast food fryer or a pint of ice cream, but let’s focus on the positives here—namely, all the frogs that survived. In 2018, The Washington Post reported on a Washington woman who opened her to-go salad from Cava only to find a frog hopping around in the greenery. This particular woman did not react well, going into a “full-on panic” before ultimately releasing it into the wild.

Just a year prior, a California woman experienced something similar when eating a prepackaged salad from Target, Los Angeles Times reported. Things ended a little differently for her, however—she kept the frog as a pet named Lucky.

When you get cash, whether it’s a $5 from a grandparent or, say, $3,000 from a cornhole tournament, your first instinct is to tuck it away somewhere safe. For pro golfer Bud Cauley, the safest place in the moments after his tournament win seemed to be a Jack in the Box fast food bag. He and a friend Ubered back to his house to discover the money had disappeared. It turns out a neighbor found the bag filled with cash in the trash and returned it; we sure hope he got a cut.