Everyone knows you’re supposed to rinse out your salad to get rid of any dirt before you chow down, but the food safety folks rarely mention the presence of frogs. So you can imagine the surprise that one California woman had on Monday when she spotted a living croaker in the salad she’d just bought from Costco.

“I saw two little eyes looking at me,” she tells the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. “I screamed and I dropped it.”

But rather than file a lawsuit against the warehouse chain, the customer called up the store to see if it was cool for her to keep the frog, which she has since named Dave. They said yes, and gave her back her money on the salad.

A rep for the company that packaged the salad says the frog was likely able to make it through the packing process because the company uses no pesticides and, while its lettuce does go through three washings and a centrifuge, it doesn’t get chopped before being packed into the plastic containers.

“Those kind of things can occasionally happen,” the rep tells the Tribune. “We process over 20,000 pounds of lettuce a day.”

Costco’s VP of food safety tells the Tribune he is “stunned” at the news and that it’s the first time he’s heard of such a thing. And while he says it’s not the kind of thing Costco can tolerate, he has to give props to the hardy creature: “If you consider that he’s been under refrigeration… you go `Holy cow he’s one tough frog.”‘

South Pasadena woman finds live tree frog in salad at Alhambra Costco [SVGtribune.com via OC Weekly]

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