Mealbreaker (n.): a nasty, non-edible surprise found in food while it is being eaten; often lawsuit-provoking, sometimes fabricated, always disgusting.
Eating dairy is not traditional in Chinese culture, but the sales of milk products have started to pick up in the People's Republic. If a strange story by the China Times News Group is to be believed though, Chinese dairy companies may be letting this rapid adoption get to their heads.
Apparently, a woman bought a bottle of yogurt on July 27, ate half of it in the morning, and then came back to her fridge to finish the rest that afternoon. While gulping it down, she tasted something strange, so she spit the yogurt out -- and found a dead fly! When she complained to the manufacturer, Bright Dairy & Food Co, company officials didn't apologize or offer her a refund. Instead, they asked her to autopsy the fly to make sure it had gotten into the yogurt before she opened it. (It is impossible to autopsy a fly.)
If Bright Dairy didn't want to pay up, it should just have explained that it was taking a cue from Dana Goodyear's insect-eating article to add a new "fly" flavor to its profile. Or that the fly was just trying to give "a shot of life to the vein" of plain yogurt, like the pomegranate-acai in a new flavor of Fage.
But seriously: get a grip, food manufacturers! When your customers complain of mealbreaker, just give them coupons and move on.
Here are 17 Mealbreakers from the past; we've dropped "Pearl in King Crab Leg" because votes in past slideshows indicated that most readers found it to be pleasant. Mealbreakers are never pleasant.
