People always joke about fast food meat — especially deep-fried fast food meat — maybe not being from the animal it claims to be. And while we’re pretty sure that KFC generally does indeed serve up actual chicken, one family in England ended up buying a Colonel’s Original Recipe hand towel.

A woman from Newcastle tells the Daily Mail that she recently bought some KFC chicken for her 7-year-old stepson, but when the youngster went to chow down on the fried bird, it revealed something blue and inedible inside.

“I got a shock,” says the stepmom. “I thought the actual chicken had gone off.”

She says it was actually worse to discover that it wasn’t spoiled chicken, but a deep-fried hand towel.

“If it was bad chicken they might have just had a bad batch or something,” she explains. “But the blue roll could have been used for anything – it could have bleach or disinfectant on it… Had someone wiped their hands on it, had it been used to wipe the floor?”

She says that when she took the hand towel and its 11 herbs and spices back to the KFC, she was told to contact KFC customer support. She did, but even then, the company wasn’t terribly responsive.

“I had to keep ringing them and keep following it up,” she says. “It felt like I had to do all the work when it was their mistake.”

KFC eventually investigated the matter and issued an apology, along with an offer of a free meal for their troubles.

“The blue tissue has most likely originated from a tissue roll used for KFC hygiene purposes,” reads the explanation given to the family. “The store assume it must have fallen unseen into the breading lug that is under the sieve and was not noticed by the cook.”

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