Utah woman says she found a snake head in canned green beans

SALT LAKE CITY — An Oregon food distribution company has halted some shipments of canned green beans after a Utah woman said she found a severed snake head in a can.

The unsettling discovery was made Wednesday night at a Mormon church in Farmington, Utah, while women and youth were preparing a meal for older members of the congregation.

Troy Walker said she was taking beans out of a slow cooker when she spotted something odd, KSL-TV in Salt Lake City reports.

“It looked pretty much like a burnt bean, and then as I got closer to lift it off the spoon, I saw eyes,” Walker said. “That’s when I just dropped it and screamed.”

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Christi Smith also was cooking that evening and told The Associated Press it was a very small snake that had clearly been cut up. After the kids all came to see it, they threw out several other large pots of string beans that were also cooking before looking inside.

“Who knows where the other parts of that snake were?” Smith said Friday.

Walker said she took the snake head and empty can back to the grocery store where she bought the food. She took a picture of the snake head to send to Western Family, an Oregon-based food distribution company whose label was on the can.

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Sharon McFadden, vice president of quality control for Western Family, said that the company takes the matter seriously and is working with the supplier that produced the green beans to find out what happened and how many cans came from the batch.

McFadden said shipments of canned green beans from the batch that came from this specific supplier are on hold. McFadden declined to disclose the supplier, saying only that it’s based in the Pacific Northwest.

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Western Family is working to find out where cans from the batch and were shipped. Once those cans are located, they will be taken off store shelves, McFadden said. The company also promises to address whatever caused the problem.

Walker said she couldn’t eat the next day because she was queasy but that she’s not mad. She just hopes nobody else finds other parts of the snake in their canned green beans.

She said she’s trying to have a sense of humor about events that are already becoming a fun little story for her and others. Youth leaders from her church helping prepare the meals thought the snake head was “kind of cool and fun,” Walker said.

She’s hosting a family dinner this weekend, and had to be clear in her texts about what will be on the menu.

“I said, ‘I promise I am not going to serve green beans. We are not having green beans,'” Walker said with a laugh.