Claim: Photograph shows a spider discovered inside an Oreo cookie.

PROBABLY FALSE

Example: [Collected via Facebook, February 2013]



This is why you always take oreos apart before eating them, always. Now think of all the oreos you’ve ever eaten foolishly. This is why you always take oreos apart before eating them, always. Now think of all the oreos you’ve ever eaten foolishly.





Origins: Nearly all claims about bizarre contaminants supposedly found in nationally distributed food products — everything from syringes in soda cans to a penis in a bottle of fruit juice — fall down when examination of the manufacturing processes behind those products demonstrates that it’s simply impossible for such foreign items to have been unknowingly introduced into the products’ packaging.

This image of a spider which was allegedly found embedded in the filling of an Oreo brand cookie is of similar ilk. Nabisco’s huge food production facility in Chicago is renowned for its cleanliness, and the type of garden spider shown here generally does not inhabit indoor environments, so it’s unlikely (although certainly not impossible) that such a spider would be in the Nabisco plant and enter the Oreos manufacturing process at just the right place and time to get pressed into the cream filling of a cookie:

The cookie shown in the picture can’t be specifically identified as an Oreo, however, so it’s possible that photo might depict a similar type of cookie produced by a company other than Nabisco and/or in a country other than the U.S., where food safety standards are laxer. Still, the most likely explanation is that someone simply opened a cookie and smashed a spider into the filling as a prank to create a funny gross-out image.