A high school student in California encountered something unexpected in his lunch at KFC. While it’s not entirely unexpected that you would find chicken body parts mixed in with other chicken body parts, most diners don’t anticipate finding what looks like a bird brain attached to their lunch. He snapped a picture, tweeted it, and then threw the scary thing away.

Warning: the actual picture is up next. Don’t click or scroll on with your eyes closed if you aren’t into that kind of thing.

He complained to a local TV station that his complaint went “ignored & unanswered,” but he did receive this tweet from KFC. Did he fail to follow up, or did the chain fail to follow up with him? Whatever the reason was, he just wanted his four bucks back.

The TV station contacted KFC on his behalf, which poked them into action and led to a local representative contacting the teen who found the kidney. The good news is that it is not a brain. It’s a kidney or possibly a gizzard: since he just snapped a few photos of it on his spork, they can’t be sure, but the company knows that it isn’t a brain, and it isn’t dangerous.

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s just a kidney” isn’t the most comforting thing that a company could say, but at least they did apologize and offer to contact the store to straighten things out.

If this story sounds familiar, it should: for some reason it tends to happen in the United Kingdom a lot, but these items that resemble brains turn up in fried food periodically. Sometimes people save them past mealtime to keep the evidence, but this is a weirdly common occurrence. Our earliest report of something similar was in 2007.

Most people aren’t keen to eat a gizzard or kidney, but there’s nothing dangerous or inherently disgusting or unsafe about it. What’s important is that in this case the student got the refund. Sure, 227 people retweeted his original photo, but you can’t buy more (kidney-free) food with retweets.

Teen finds Chicken Organ in KFC, Just Wants his $4 Back [Fox 40]

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