MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — An Australian farmer’s dinner preparations took an unexpected turn when he discovered a living amphibian nestled among the greens in his grocery store lettuce bag.
Rhys Smoker was getting ready to make steak and salad for his three housemates on Saturday at their residence in Esperance, located in Western Australia state, when he made the surprising find inside the sealed plastic packaging he had purchased from a local supermarket, according to housemate Laura Jones, who spoke on Tuesday.
“He’s like, ‘Oh Bro, there’s a frog in the lettuce.’ And we’re like, ‘No, you’re taking the mick, like that’s not real,’” Jones explained to AP. The phrase “taking the mick” refers to trying to trick someone.
Smoker carried the package to the living area to demonstrate the discovery to Jones and her partner Billy Le Pine.
“Obviously there’s a little frog hiding out and, yeah, we all had a little laugh about it,” Jones recalled.
According to Le Pine, the group decided to call their unexpected visitor Greg and later set him free at a nearby pond.
“We thought we’d give him a wee send off tune as we played Crazy Frog for him,” Le Pine shared with Australian Broadcasting Corp. Crazy Frog refers to a Swedish computer-animated character and Eurodance performer.
The lettuce had been purchased by Smoker and his partner Lilli Ashby from a Woolworths store in Esperance on the same day Greg was found.
This isn’t the first time Australian shoppers have encountered wildlife in supermarkets. Five years earlier, a customer came face-to-face with a 3-meter-long (10-foot-long) harmless diamond python on a Woolworths shelf in Sydney. Additionally, in 2021, another shopper found a dangerous pale-headed snake wrapped with lettuce in plastic at an ALDI store in Sydney.
According to Woolworths, the frog incident appears to be a one-off occurrence with no similar reports received. “Our teams are investigating this with our suppliers as a priority,” the company stated.
The supermarket chain offered an apology to the household and supplied them with a new lettuce bag.
