A man in Canada says he’s OK after a berry unsettling breakfast experience earlier this month.
On April 11, Reddit user @RandyBoBandy___, who lives in Montreal, Canada, posted a horror story — which has since been upvoted over 144,000 times — about the waffles he had for breakfast.
“After eating two of these blueberry waffles, i went to heat up two more and saw that the package was for plain waffles,” the Redditor wrote in the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit. “I ate mold.”
Get Tri-state area news and weather forecasts to your inbox. Sign up for NBC New York newsletters.
If you're now looking twice at the image out of disbelief, you’re surely not alone. Hold your screen close to your face and you'll realize that, no, what's in those waffles is not the little blue bombs of sweetness typically found in blueberry waffles, but something much more nefarious — mold.
This revelation by the Redditor, naturally, caused shock, awe and just plain grossed-out reactions in the comments section.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a thread make me this queasy before,” one Redditor said.
U.S. & World
“Bro eats moldy waffles once,” wrote another Redditor, sharing a clip from “The Last of Us,” a show where a fungal infection turns people into violent mushroom monsters.
“There’s no way this is true. Those are clearly blueberry waffles,” someone else joked.
“I thought it was a blueberry waffle too!” wrote another user. “If it makes you feel any better… I had two servings of moldy lemon tea recently. I only realized when I got a huge chunk of mold on the tip of my lips.”
“My grandma used to call it ‘free penicillin.’ She lived through the Great Depression,’” wrote another Reddit user. (Just to say it: That’s not exactly how penicillin was made.)
“Ehhh, so mold taste like blueberry?” asked another incredulous Redditor.
“Honestly many factors i’d say made me not notice,” the original poster wrote in response. “1- I was watching TV 2-I ate it with maple syrup 3-It was dark 4-I might have covid, or a bad cold 5- its 5 AM where i’m at 6-Its the cheap waffles, i never expect any real flavour.”
Despite that explanation, many Redditors still had questions, so we spoke to the original poster about how this could have transpired.
“We had a crazy ice storm, so the power went out starting Thursday afternoon and it went out for four days,” the OP, who asked to be referred to as “Randy,” told TODAY.com.
Randy explains that a few days before the incident, he took all of his perishables out of his freezer, put them in a cooler bag and put it outside, where there was more ice than indoors at the time. “But, I left some stuff in the freezer that I didn’t think was going to get affected. So, I left the waffles in there,” he says.
A few days later, at around 5 a.m., he says he opened the freezer and chose a box of waffles that would change his life forever.
“It was pretty dark and my freezer doesn’t have a light or anything, so I just took two waffles out and put them in the toaster. I ate them with maple syrup,” Randy says. “When I came back, I noticed that the package was for plain waffles, and so I was like, 'What?’ And I took out another waffle and looked at it. It was the worst 10 seconds of my life, it came crashing down on me.”
Randy says after snapping a photo of one of the offending waffles, he went into deep-clean mode, tossing almost anything that could possibly grow any unwelcome fuzzy guests. “I wasn’t taking any chances. I went into overdrive because I never want this to happen to me ever again,” he says.
Randy says he didn’t end up falling ill, and that this experience didn’t make him swear off waffles forever — or even for a day. “I ate blueberry waffles like the next day. I don’t get grossed out that easily,” he said, reiterating that they were actually blueberry this time.
The biggest surprise, he says, was not the moldy waffle but the overwhelming response to it.
“I thought I would just get like 100 upvotes and people would be grossed out, which was the point,” Randy says. “But to this day, I don’t know why so many people were so interested in a guy eating a moldy waffle, but they were. I don’t understand the internet.”
If you run into moldy food in your own fridge or pantry (or cooler, like Randy), the USDA says to avoid sniffing the item, which can cause respiratory trouble. If food is covered in mold, discard it, and clean the spot where the food was stored, checking nearby items as well, as mold may have already spread there.
And, it might go without saying, but definitely don’t toast it and douse it in maple syrup for breakfast.
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
