Isn’t it a good thing when you get a bonus item with your lunch? Not when that bonus item is a dead, uncooked frog hanging out in the middle of the bowl. That’s what a Wall Street Journal staffer allegedly found in her bowl at a Manhattan Pret-a-Manger. It was a tuna salad. Not a frog salad. We cannot emphasize this enough.

Here at Consumerist, we noticed a strange uptick in reports of dead animals in packaged vegetables. Most of these animals were frogs, and we came to call all animals included in food that weren’t meant to be there, from rats to insects to chunks of snake, “free frogs.”

(Warning: actual frog photo below)

This is going to happen when we eat organic greens, fresh from the field. We get it. Sometimes it’s hard to accept the dual nature of our food, as plants that once grew outside and animals that once walked around. Maybe because when we’re paying premium prices for someone to clean and chop those vegetables and make a salad for us, we expect that salad to be free of dead animals that we didn’t order.

Wall Street Journal colleagues blogged and Instagrammed about the free frog, reporting that the diner who found it was “pretty shaken.”

Pret A Manger contacted Gothamist to let them know that they’re taking the froggy very seriously.

At Pret A Manger, we take issues like this very seriously. Our lettuce is sourced from farms that do not use any pesticides on its produce, therefore organic matter does very rarely manage to pass through our production process. We are currently looking into this issue to make every effort that this does not happen again.

Photo: Woman Finds Frog In Pret A Manger Salad [Gothamist]

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