Not on par. Photo: FDA

It’s been a strange month for food-safety alerts — a rotting bat in Walmart salad greens, a live scorpion crawling through a bag of Giant-brand spinach, and now bits of golf ball in frozen hash browns. McCain Foods, one of the biggest manufacturers of potato products, has warned customers to be on the lookout for “extraneous golf ball materials” in two different hash-brown products it makes — two-pound bags of Roundy’s Southern Style Hash Browns sold at Mariano’s, Metro Market, and Pick ’n Save supermarkets in Illinois and Wisconsin, plus the two-pound bags of Harris Teeter Southern Style Hash Browns sold at grocery chains in D.C. and seven Southern states. McCain’s recall notice says that “despite our stringent supply standards,” the balls “may have been inadvertently harvested” alongside the potatoes used in those products, which probably raises more questions than it answers for most people.

Obviously, consumers are “urged not to consume” the contents of affected bags, explaining that decision could “pose a choking hazard or other physical injury to the mouth.” Thankfully, the company says there are no reports of injuries yet.