A New Jersey man says his bag of Whole Foods trail mix included a little extra calcium that, unfortunately, came in the form of a small animal bone. Tom Lukas claims he picked up a bag of the company’s 365 Berry Bounty Trail Mix this past Sunday while shopping with his wife and son. The ingredients are uniformly chewy (just nuts and dried fruit), so when he bit down onto something hard, he tells the local news he quickly spit it out, looked at it, and then “handed it to my wife and asked her, ‘Hey, does this look like it’s a bone?’” She told him yes, so they called Whole Foods “immediately.” At this point, Lukas adds he got nauseous wondering “what other body parts I was eating while consuming that bag.”
He filed a complaint with Camden County health officials and took his story to local news station Fox 29, which sent a reporter to the store with a camera and discovered the rest of the bags were already pulled from the shelf:
Once Fox 29’s Chasing News team got involved, they also had a couple of vets inspect the quarter-size foreign object and sent photos off to a zoological pathologist at the University of Wisconsin. Chasing News (whose shtick, as the clip shows, is a bit TMZ-y) says the experts agreed it’s a mammal bone, although they couldn’t seem to agree on which mammal’s — maybe a rat or mouse’s, but one doctor said it’s “the size of a guinea pig.” Lukas wants Whole Foods to recall the remaining bags of that trail mix, but for now the corporate office has only publicly responded to Chasing News, which says it mailed the company everything it has except the bone (which is still in Lukas’s possession). Whole Foods’ official statement is less than sympathetic:
Because the Chasing News team has withheld the results of any lab examination of the object allegedly found in one of our products, we cannot speak directly to this claim. Whole Foods Market is deeply committed to quality assurance and transparency, which cannot be said of Chasing News.
[Fox 29]
