As appetising dinners go, a nice crunchy salad can often hit the spot.
But imagine one Kirkcaldy woman’s surprise when she cut into her healthy treat only to discover a huge live insect lying neatly on top of her lettuce leaves.
Louise Saunders, 44, dished out the contents of her Sainsbury’s salad bag on to her plate on Wednesday night and assembled what she thought was going to be a nutritious meal.
However, there was one ingredient that she hadn’t bargained for.
“Whatever it was, it moved when I tried to put my knife through it not realising what it was,” she said.
“I nearly wet myself!
“It’s not something you expect to see when you are eating your tea.
“To be honest I was just reading the paper and wasn’t really paying much attention, but when my knife hit it I thought: ‘Why is there something hard on my plate?’ and started screaming.
“My husband Greig works away during the week and normally I get the neighbour in to deal with spiders and that sort of thing, but I was on my own for this one!
“It looks like a cricket or a locust, but I’m not that bothered what it was it shouldn’t have been there.
“I had just emptied my bin and the black bag was waiting to go out, so I just scooped it in there and put it out.
“But it’s given me the complete heave I don’t think I’ll be eating lettuce for a while now.”
Thankfully, the chance of finding unwelcome visitors in foodstuffs remains rare.
All supermarkets say they have stringent checks during production but, with many products being shipped in from exotic places, the possibility of the likes of crickets, locusts, grasshoppers and other creepy-crawlies ending up on a plate in Scotland cannot be ruled out.
To make matters worse, Louise revealed that she had enjoyed salad from the same bag at lunchtime on Tuesday and Wednesday without knowing what was lurking inside.
“I’m surprised it was still alive because it had been in my fridge since Monday, but it definitely moved,” she added.
A Sainsbury’s spokesperson said: “We take food safety very seriously and we have strict procedures in place to stop this kind of thing from happening.
“We apologise to our customer for any distress this has caused.”