Walmart doughnuts containing sharp metal fragments landed a 6-year-old boy in the Irwin Army Hospital in Fort Riley, Kansas on Sunday. Logan Ratai is now on antiobiotics and a clear liquid diet to recover from a so-far-unexplained case of food contamination.
According to KAKE, Logan’s mom Kelly Ratai explained that his father brought the Walmart doughnuts home for a breakfast treat.
However, when Logan Ratai bit into a doughnut , he chipped his tooth. And he must have also swallowed some of what turned out to be metallic black shards.
Kelly Ratai said, “There were pieces of black metal, some of them looked like rings, like washers off of a little screw, [and] some of them were black metal fragments, like real sharp pieces.”
WIBW said that Walmart has responded by pulling the bakery doughnuts off the shelves at the Junction City WalMart where Ratai bought the contaminated box.
WalMart spokeswoman Kayla Wahling said that a Food Safety Team is investigating. They’ll work with the doughnut suppliers to figure out how the metal got into the baked goods.
At this point, there don’t seem to be any answers. One possibility is that the metal shards somehow got swept by accident into the doughnut batter.
An even more disturbing possibility is that someone deliberately contaminated the Walmart doughnuts.
But it’s worth being cautious about such accusations.
In late April, a strange case of food contamination arose when 50-year-old Ramineh Behbehanian was arrested for slipping poisoned orange juice into a Starbucks refrigerated display case. The suspect was a trained chemist who worked in research and development.
Starbucks employees noticed a funny smell on the orange juice bottles. San Jose, California investigators thought the chemist brought the poisoned bottles to the store and then swapped them into the case. She would have then removed the good bottles in her purse.
However, according to CBS San Francisco, the authorities dropped the charges a month later. It was revealed that the alleged poison was actually vinegar. The orange juice may have spoiled naturally.
In other words, the entire Starbucks poisoning case was likely a case of hysteria.
We’ll update you on Logan Ratai’s recovery and the Walmart doughnut case when we get new information.
[doughnut photo credit: Scott Ableman via photopin cc ]