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If your hash browns taste like golf balls, it's because they have golf balls in them

If your hash browns taste like golf balls, it's because they have golf balls in them

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McCain Foods USA is voluntarily recalling hash browns “that may be contaminated with extraneous golf ball materials.”

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Photos: Shutterstock

People sitting down to a breakfast of southern-style frozen hash browns might be surprised to find “extraneous golf ball materials” mixed in with their potatoes, according to a voluntary recall announcement issued by McCain Foods USA.

The golf ball-tainted potato products are the two-pound bags of Roundy’s Brand and Harris Teeter Brand frozen, southern style hash browns bagged on or after January 19th. McCain Foods urges customers who bought these products to resist their hash brown cravings because of the risk of choking on golf ball bits or simply “other physical injury to the mouth.”

The golf balls “may have been inadvertently harvested with potatoes used to make this product.”

How exactly the golf balls found their way into hash browns is still a mystery. All the company said in the announcement was that the golf balls “may have been inadvertently harvested with potatoes used to make this product.” McCain Foods did not say whether this means that they’ve discovered a new way to grow golf balls alongside potatoes. When I called the customer helpline, the gentleman on the other end of the call directed me to McCain Foods’ communications officer, who didn’t pick up the phone. We will update the story when they reply about their golf ball-growing ambitions.

This month has provided ample fodder for a disgusting food-related game of ‘would you rather.’ Earlier in April, Fresh Express recalled some cases of its Organic Marketside Spring Mix because two people had eaten a salad that turned out to have a dead bat in it. The bat fragments had to be sent to a lab for tests, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported, because, “The deteriorated condition of the bat did not allow for CDC to definitively rule out whether this bat had rabies.”

Yum. Personally, I think I’d rather eat the golf balls.