Anthony Garcia of Albuquerque, N.M., pleaded guilty Thursday to handing out a contaminated food sample in the grocery store where he worked, Associated Press reported. Garcia faces up to three years in prison and three years of supervised release for handing a female customer a yogurt sample with a spoon that contained some of his semen. The woman spat out the sample after tasting it, noting that it tasted like a bodily fluid. An investigation ensued, and a DNA test established that the semen came from Garcia.
Semen in yogurt? Could anything be more disgusting? While deliberate food-tampering cases are rare, there have been other egregious incidents. You decide which is the grossest:
* In 1984, religious cult Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Oregon attempting to disrupt a local election contaminated salad bars with Salmonella typhimurium, causing 751 people to get sick.
* A lab worker caused 12 people to become ill in 1996 when he contaminated a tray of doughnuts and muffins with Shigella disenteria type 2. After contaminating the food, he reportedly used his supervisor's email to invite co-workers to come and eat.
* An insecticide containing nicotine was deliberately added to 200 pounds of ground beef in Michigan in 2003, sickening 111 people.
* A New York McDonald's employee was arrested for allegedly providing a Big Mac with glass shards in it to a police officer in 2005. The worker who initially confessed to putting glass in the burger, 18-year-old Albert Garcia, claimed he did it as a joke, and didn't target the police officer. He later retracted his confession and was acquitted by a jury. Whether the case involved actual contamination or a was a set-up by the officer who later sued McDonald's is an issue in a pending court case.
Deliberate food contamination happens in other countries, too:
* Romania, 1999: Seen the movie "The Help?" There's a real-life food contamination parallel affecting cream buns and chocolate éclairs in Isai, Romania. In 1999, investigators looking into why 67 people became ill after eating bakery items from the Opera bakery found a box of human feces in the refrigerator.
* China, 2002: A fast food outlet owner took competition to a deadly extreme, contaminating a competitor's food with rat poison. Forty people died and 200 more were hospitalized.
* Canada, 1970: Two students suffered acute respiratory failure and two others got sick when their roommate contaminated their food with Ascaris suum, a parasite, in 1970.
* Sweden, 2008: A left-leaning internet forum claimed responsibility for contaminating food at the right-wing Confederation of Swedish Enterprise's restaurant with Shigella dysenteria, sickening 140.
Carol Bengle Gilbert writes about consumer issues for the Yahoo! Contributor Network.
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