Your fortune? A whole lotta ick, right about now.
One might think that, as a standard, your food should not contain any creepy-crawlies. Unfortunately, many diners have discovered that bugs and other creatures are a significant issue in the food we currently eat.
Whether it’s actually becoming more common or simply becoming more visible is uncertain, but there are numerous examples from the recent past. For example, one woman claimed that she discovered a dead animal in her energy drink. Another internet user alleged they found worms in their Chef Boyardee pasta. A further user showed a bug sealed in a jar of pickles.
Now, another internet user has gone viral after sharing their own animal discovery.
What’s Inside This Woman’s Fortune Cookie?
In a video with over 10 million views, TikTok user @c4ndyrg shows herself and another person sitting at a table at Panda Express. In front of them is a fortune cookie in a sealed package.
“When you get panda but the saxophones are getting louder,” she writes in the video overlay text. For those who are unaware, this is referencing a viral meme.
As the video continues, something moves within the bag of the fortune cookie. It quickly becomes clear that the moving creature is a spider.
The spider appears to be a ground spider. While not dangerous, finding one in your food is certainly gross.
How Is This Possible?
There are a few ways that this could have happened.
The first is that the package is not as sealed as it appears in the video. If there’s even a small hole in the package, a curious spider can open it up and crawl inside. From there, it can simply hang out until someone—such as a Panda Express customer—disturbs its hiding place.
One may wonder how a spider can survive if stuck in a package. The answer is that spiders are pretty resilient, with many able to survive for several weeks without access to food. Even a sealed package may still exchange gases, and the oxygen in the package alone may be enough to sustain the spider for days or weeks.
This latter point opens up another possibility: the spider crawled in during production.
Fortune cookies are baked as flat discs. While they’re still hot and flexible, the fortune paper is inserted and the cookie is folded. Following that, it goes down a conveyor belt where it cools and hardens before being put into plastic packaging.
It’s possible that, at some point during this process, a live spider found its way into or around the cookie. From there, it got wrapped up in the package as an unwilling passenger.
Another Option
The final possibility is that the video is fake. The video could be entirely generated with AI, or the spider could have been added in post, potentially using AI tools. This is uncertain, but given how common AI-generated content is on the internet, it’s something that must be considered.
Regardless of how it happened—if it actually did happen—it would likely be considered a quality control failure. The TikToker has not followed up to clarify how the situation was resolved with Panda Express, nor if the company reached out to her after the video went viral.
Viewers Are Disgusted
In the comments section, users shared their disgust about the situation.
“So they’d be paying me for life,” wrote a user.
“The misfortune cookie,” joked another.
That said, some insisted that it wasn’t the fault of the individual Panda Express location.
“As someone who worked at panda for two years. not a panda issue. we get them sent to us in cases that we just unbox, the manufacturing company messed that up,” stated a commenter.
@c4ndyrg @Panda Express never eating one again #pandaexpress #spider #fyp #zxycba
BroBible reached out to Panda Express via email and @c4ndyrg via TikTok direct message and comment.