MELBOURNE, Australia — This is not the kind of salad garnish one would expect to find.
Rhys Smoker, a farmer in Australia, found a live frog in a bag of lettuce, but he had trouble convincing his roommates, The Associated Press reported.
Smoker was making a steak and salad dinner on Saturday for himself and his three roommates in his house in Esperance, a remote town located in Western Australia, according to the news organization.
That is when he noticed the small frog inside a sealed plastic bag he had bought from a local supermarket, roommate Laura Jones said on Tuesday.
“He’s like, ‘Oh bro, there’s a frog in the lettuce.’ And we’re like, ‘No, you’re taking the mick (a slang term that means trying to fool someone), like that’s not real,’” Jones told the AP.
It was definitely real.
Smoker brought the bag into the lounge room to prove he was not telling a joke, show it 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,” said Jones, a native of New Zealand.
“He’s the most casual Australian ever,” Jones told 102.5 ABC Perth. “It was just out of the ordinary for Kiwis.”
The lettuce was bought by Smoker and his partner, Lilli Ashby, at a Woolworths, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported. Store officials have launched an investigation.
In a statement, Woolworths officials called the wayward frog “an isolated event with no other reported cases,” the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
Le Pine said they named the frog Greg before releasing it at a pond near the house.
He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the amphibian, which he presumed was transported from Australia’s eastern states, was probably about the size of his palm.
“It’s quite a decent-sized frog for a big adventure,” he told the news outlet. “The bag of lettuce does have holes in it to keep the produce fresh, so he had a snack and some air on his way over.”
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