Media Myth: Nine Worst Business Stories
(of the Last 50 Years)

3. Wendy’s Finger Food
 

     An infamous case occurred March 22, 2005, when Anna Ayala alleged she found a piece of human finger in a bowl of chili she bought at a Wendy’s in California.

     National newspapers largely ignored the story. The New York Times was the only major  national paper to report the case in the week after the allegations surfaced. It published a short Associated Press report on March 25, saying “a woman bit into part of a human finger while eating a bowl of chili at a Wendy’s restaurant.”

     ABC’s “Good Morning America” was a different story.

     Bob Woodruff on March 24 reported “a grisly discovery for a customer at Wendy’s. A California woman found a human finger in a bowl of chili this week.” He didn’t even question the validity of the report.

     The next morning, ABC’s Robin Roberts followed up by making the story about safety in fast food restaurants nationwide. Without bothering to mention that hoaxes were attempted frequently, Roberts wondered “how concerned should we all be about the safety of the food we consume?”

     Roberts even called in Caroline Smith DeWaal of the anti-business Center for Science in the Public Interest, who called the incident “a terrible process control failure,” “horrible” and “terrible.” She noted that “most restaurant food is very safe,” but assumed Ayala’s story was true.

     At one point, Roberts questioned whether “sabotage” could be a factor, and DeWaal allowed that it could have been “a grotesque prank or some kind of industrial sabotage,” arguing that “the finger appears to have been in the chili for some time.”

     During a March 28 interview, Chris Cuomo asked Ayala how she was dealing with people questioning her story. Cuomo asked Ayala and her attorney how they responded to people who thought the story was too much to be true, but never directly questioned her on the truthfulness of her claim.

     Ayala’s lawyer, Jeffrey Janoff, insisted there was “documentary proof” of the incident and “no one is saying it’s not true. The medical examiner has examined the finger, proved that it was a finger. So, this is obviously not a hoax.”

     Yet on April 12, after Ayala’s home had been searched by police, Diane Sawyer reminded viewers that “some of the highest-profile incidents like this have turned out to be hoaxes.” The segment even featured a food industry defense attorney, who said “food fakers may be attracted by the aroma of easy money.”

     But the story still reported that Ayala “is upset over the direction the investigation is taking” and let her continue making her baseless claims.

     As police investigated the case, it became clearer that Ayala had staged the event and by April 14, she had dropped plans to sue Wendy’s. The AP reported April 9 that Ayala had a history of suing corporations, including the fast food chain El Pollo Loco. She had also sued General Motors over a car accident, but the case was dismissed, according to the AP.

     “Wendy’s is in a serious image pickle,” USA Today reported March 30. “Wendy’s is desperately trying to prove its innocence. The company says it investigated the March 22 incident and insists the 1.5-inch fingertip – which appears to be a woman’s because it was manicured – did not come from the restaurant or any of its suppliers.”

     Ayala was arrested April 22 and the case was labeled a “hoax” on April 23 when she was charged with attempted larceny. But in the month between her allegations and arrest, Ayala’s false claims and the media’s failure to be skeptical of them damaged the company.

     Wendy’s reported 2-to-2.5-percent losses across all of its restaurants and 20-to-50-percent drops in its San Francisco Bay Area restaurants, according to The New York Times. The story also encouraged “copycats.” At least 20 people across the country claimed to find “everything from fingernails to a chicken bone” in their food.

     The storyline wasn’t original. In 1996, a New Jersey doctor claimed to find a rat tail among the french fries in his son’s McDonald’s Happy Meal. He tried to get $5 million out of the company, but a jury later convicted him of attempted extortion. The same doctor had already received a settlement from Coca-Cola after claiming he consumed a greasy substance in a can of Coke.

     In 2000, a woman claimed to find a fried chicken head in her box of McDonald’s wings in Newport News, Va. The Washington Post reported more than two years later that “we’ll probably never know if this was a hoax by [Katherine] Ortega” because she refused to turn the head over to health inspectors.

     In 2004, a woman in Hampton Roads, Va., claimed to find a dead mouse in her soup at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. The woman and her son attempted to get a settlement from the food chain, but an investigation revealed they had planted the mouse.

     In spite of the history of attempts to extort money from large food companies with ridiculously disgusting health scares, in the Wendy’s case the media failed to apply a “smell test” to a suspicious story. But it’s the businesses in question, not the media, that suffered for those mistakes.

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