The Dangerous Potato Recall That's Still A Mystery Today

With all the different ways you can slice a potato — or fry, bake, mash, or hash your potato recipes — it's easy to forget how many spuds we're constantly eating. And this means a big enough potato recall can affect millions of people. Usually, the most common reasons foods are recalled involve contamination from harmful bacteria like E. coli or listeria or allergy-triggering substances that aren't mentioned on the box. Sometimes recalls are spurred by pieces of plastic or even metal bits making their way into the food, which can cause an entire product line to be recalled out of caution. However, one potato recall went a step beyond that, and it still remains a mystery today: People were finding potatoes with sewing needles jammed inside of them.

The incidents (and they did happen more than once) all took place around Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada around 2014 and 2015. The biggest one was traced to a sizable Canadian operation called Linkletter Farms, which had to initiate an enormous recall after a customer found a sewing needle in freshly bought spuds. Thankfully nobody was injured, but nobody was ever caught, either — and the motivations of whoever it was remain unknown. An investigation found that Linkletter hadn't broken any guidelines for potato processing, leading to wider suspicions among the public that a bad actor had tampered with the food.

Just a few months after the initial incident, needles were found in french fries at the Cavendish Farms production plant. That time, they were discovered before they ever got a chance to be shipped to stores, so no recall was required. Some of the potatoes that were used to make those fries were from Linkletter Farms, but others were from a different undisclosed source. All in all, over 800,000 pounds of potatoes and french fries still got trashed in the immediate aftermath. The Prince Edward Island Potato Board even offered $50,000 in reward money (later, it was increased to $100,000) for information about the culprit, but the mystery remains unsolved.

In 2016, there was yet another report from Halifax of a needle found in a leftover batch of cooked potatoes, though the incident was never officially tied to a specific Prince Edward Island farm. While the details in most of the reports point to intentional food tampering, some investigators have floated the idea that the needles could have been accidentally introduced somewhere along the supply chain or even in the consumer's home.

Since then, the scare seems to have calmed down. Prince Edward Island is Canada's central hub for potatoes, and certain plants have upped their security by installing large metal detectors to keep future needles at bay. The sewing needle story remains a potent potato legend in the area, and if it truly was the work of a rogue tamperer, they're still out there somewhere.