Let’s imagine that you’ve got a job. You’ve been working hard all day in the office, and when lunchtime comes around you decide to head down to Pret a Manger to pick up a delicious salad to take back to your desk. You figure it’ll be tasty and super-healthy, especially as it’s organic. That’s certainly what an employee at the Wall Street Journal did recently.
There’s a running joke between people who don’t eat organic food that it probably will contain dead insects or the like. And occasionally you do get a case of that reported, but people don’t often believe it. But you can sort of understand insects getting in there, but there’s no way anything bigger would ever turn up. Well, as our unnamed Wall Street Journal girl discovered, that can happen. She tucked into her salad to find a dead frog. Which is clearly something that could just happen by accident.
Except, a frog is quite big. The picture above; it’s pretty noticeable. How did this happen? Surely there must be some kind of checks done along the way? Well, Pret a Manger have cleared up how this could possibly happen. “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”. That clears everything up. See, that seems to suggest that to ensure that only rarely does organic matter pass through, it gets checked somewhere along the way. What that seems to actually mean, is that throughout the entire production process, from receiving the greens right up to packaging individual salads and putting them out on the shelves, not one single person managed to pick up on a dead frog being in there. It just seems like they could have made just a tiny bit of effort along the way. It sort of makes you wonder what smaller things have been passing through unnoticed too.
Pret did refund the salad, and give the customer a voucher for a free meal, although I’m not a hundred percent certain she’ll be using the voucher. Given she was rather shaken up by the ordeal, I doubt she’s going to feel like going back for round two of mystery ingredients.
Ari Carrington
