Campbell’s Chicken and Stars soup is the perfect soup when you’re feeling sick, mostly because it doesn’t contain much chicken and requires very little, if any, chewing. Maybe that’s changing now, though. A Colorado woman found something strange in her daughter’s soup. It was chicken, at least: but what was a whole chicken embryo doing in a can of soup? Turns out that’s not what it was.

If pickled and still in the egg, a chicken embryo would be a perfectly acceptable and delicious snack food in much of the world. Small American children generally aren’t known for their exotic food tastes, though, and that’s the target market for this soup.

The woman who found the embryo was, understandably, a little freaked out. This is less horrifying than most tales of animals in foods where they don’t belong that we’ve seen, if only because chicken soup is supposed to contain chicken. Just not whole chickens. From fertilized eggs.

“I opened it up, and there was this [speck] in there — I was like, ‘What is that?’ I looked a little bit closer and I was like, ‘Oh, that looks like a dead chicken,'” she told a local TV station.

Good news, though: the object turned out to not be a chicken embryo. It wasn’t a whole animal at all. The TV station brought the soup to a nearby lab while awaiting a FedEx box from Campbell’s, and learned that it was just a piece of chicken. Maybe not the right part of the chicken for that type of soup, that’s all.

“It looks to be more like a tendon or cartilage that would be used to bind the muscle to the bone,” a helpful lab technician told the TV station.

In a statement, Campbell’s said:

Campbell Soup Company takes all claims of product contamination very seriously. Whenever we receive such a claim, it is fully investigated by our Quality Assurance team to determine its possible cause. We are in the process of evaluating the claim and have not yet received the exhibit from the consumer to conduct our investigation

Let’s not go crazy here. Remember: the item in question is a piece of chicken in a soup that is, by design, made with chicken.

Strange object found floating in a can of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars soup, mother says [KMGH] (via Jezebel)
Mystery object found floating in bowl of Campbell’s soup ID’d; lab says it’s not a chicken embryo [KMGH]

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