Nestle's Maggoty Goobers

UPDATE II: This Goobery, Maggoty post scores #9 on Consumerist's 15 Grossest Stories of the Year! (My wife is hugely unimpressed!)

UPDATE: Welcome Consumerist readers! If ya'll know anything about tracking codes, I have pics at the bottom of this post of the offending box of Goobers & Worms.

So my wife peels the cellophane from a box of Goobers the other night while we are both sitting on the sofa watching TV. She opens the box, fiddling around with her laptop, pops a few Goobers in her mouth. Gets settled in.

If you live with females, you get accustomed to their noises--generally higher pitched, mostly pleasing to the ear, soothing usually (when happiness abounds) but, at times, females have a register that denotes to any male that SOMETHING IS WRONG. Usually, this is directly correlated to the man's irksomeness, but not always. My wife let out a full-throated scream that I've only really heard in my nightmares when she is being carried off by a giant squid or something and both of my legs have been cut off and I can't help her. An adrenalin bomb went off in my body, sending the fight or flee chemical through my bloodstream--ready to do battle with giant squids, home invasion punks, or the IRS. I actually looked around for my cellphone, thinking a blood vessel had burst in her head and I was going to have to call 911 while stanching a flow of blood from her nose.

A winged creature of indeterminate species and nature had just exited her box of Goobers and had brushed her chin on its way to freedom. She bolted upright from the sofa, the box of Goobers landing on the coffee table, flailing at her body with her hands, like she was on fire. GET IT OFF! Then she bent over, her trembling hands on her knees and spit out what was in her mouth onto the floor. The dogs, agitated and fearful from the real-life screaming, not knowing if they were going to be pressed into racoon duty again (another story), moved through the room like three International Harvesters, lapping up the surprise sweet treats recently deposited wetly onto the floor (you could almost see the three of them with little thought balloons above their heads thinking AND THIS MUNIFICENCE IS FROM THE ONE WHO TOLERATES US--WOOT!)

Oh, if it was just about a wayward bug. The box of Goobers on the coffee table was fairly crawling, like the steak on the counter in Poltergeist, that bursts in the middle and spews wormy maggots, when the guy is getting ready to eat it, my wife's box of Goobers was ALIVE and crawling with maggots. My daughter hove into view and joined the I JUST HAD MAGGOTS IN MY MOUTH hysteria that my wife had currently descended into (and to be honest, 36 hours later, has still not come back from).

I peered inside the box and saw lumpen, misshapen Goobers with maggots or some kind of larvae crawling everywhere:

I poured the box of Goobers out onto a paper towel on the counter just to make sure there wasn't a severed finger or ear inside (They're finding severed feet over there in Canada, who knows what else is in a box of maggoty Goobers?):



Not being one to be unreasonable, and realizing that all of us are chowing down insect parts and rodent hairs pretty much every day, I fired off an email to Nestle, expressing our concerns and received this polite automated response in return:

"Your message has been sent to Nestleusa.com. We appreciate your feedback - it helps us to better serve you with our products, our recipes and our Web site. Please contact us anytime we can be of assistance to you."

Of course, I'm giving Nestle the benefit of the doubt here and time to construct a decent response to this outrage, but if there isn't one, I'll guess I'll move to the next level of Consumer Done Wrong Hell and see what happens. Here's a video of the critters crawling around the Goobers. Caution--females may emit really high pitched noises upon viewing--males too for that matter:

Pics of UPC and tracking codes: