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Claim: A patron dining at a Wendy's fast food outlet found a human finger in her bowl of chili.
Origins: Claims of human body parts turning up in food products are the most horrifying of contaminated food legends, both because of our very strong societal taboo against the eating of human flesh, and because such a discovery suggests a human death, almost certainly one that was 
accidental rather than natural (and which conjures up images of a slow and painful death by industrial accident), or at least a painful dismemberment.
Fortunately, improved health and safety standards in food processing make such occurrences quite rare, and most reports of consumers finding body parts in food turn out to be hoaxes, frauds perpetrated to extort money from businesses, or cases of mistaken identity. (In the latter case, something that looks like a human body is often found, upon examination by experts, to be something else entirely. See, for example, our page about a scare involving a finger supposedly found in a can of menudo.) In March 2005, the news media were once again full of reports that such a grisly discovery had been made. On the evening of 22 March 2005, Anna Ayala, a 39-year-old resident of Las Vegas was dining at a San Jose outlet of the Wendy's fast food restaurant chain when she discovered what appeared to be a human finger in her bowl of chili. According to the San Jose Mercury News:
Devina Cordero, 20, was with her boyfriend at the fast food restaurant when she said the woman, who has not been identified, began gasping and ran up to her saying: "Don't eat it! Look, there's a human finger in our chili."
The following day, Santa Clara County health officials confirmed the object found in the bowl of Wendy's chili was indeed a human finger (about Cordero said the object appeared cooked and seemed to have a long fingernail at the end. All three people soon became sick. "We went up to the counter and they told us it was a vegetable," Cordero said. "The people from Wendy's were poking it with a spoon." [San Jose police officer Enrique] Garcia said the Santa Clara County Health Department is taking over the investigation. "It was some sort of small mass which appeared to have a fingernail. It's a small piece," Garcia said. "They collected the finger and placed it in a freezer for the health department." Wendy's offered a $50,000 reward for information on the origin of the finger as sales at Wendy's outlets (particularly in the San Francisco-San Jose bay area) dropped off significantly in the weeks following the incident. Meanwhile, suspicions that
The case took a few more intriguing turns in mid-April. First Ms. Allman offered to submit to DNA testing to identify whether the finger supposedly found in the bowl of Wendy's chili was hers, but a match was doubtful in light of news reports that her lost fingertip was only half as long as the one Anna Ayala claimed to have found. On Update: On 21 April 2005, Anna Ayala was arrested by Las Vegas police on charges of attempted grand larceny pertaining to the Wendy's case. Police later determined the mysterious finger Ayala claimed to have found in a bowl of chili came from an associate of her husband's, who lost his fingertip when it was severed in the tailgate of a truck during a work accident at an asphalt maintenance company and evidently gave the digit to a Last updated: 19 January 2006 This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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