Is This Worm In Your Chopt Salad Gross Enough To Make You Throw It All Away?

I've gone on the record as a proud advocate for Happy Desk Lunches. But some people just can't help but roll the dice and go out for their fancy shmancy soups and their lolly dolly tuna sandwiches to go. If you play with fire, you're going to get burned—so the next time you go pickup a Chopt salad, don't say we didn't warn you.

"Beware of the CHOPT by Bryant Park!" Kristie Lee, who was the recipient of the wormy surprise at the Chopt location at 11 West 42nd Street on Tuesday, told Gothamist. "Just found a healthy live worm enjoying an afternoon IN MY SALAD!"

Lee and her coworker, who work as an art director and photographer, discovered the intruder in the Spicy Santorini salad around 2:15 p.m. on Tuesday. "[My coworker] was eating a bit of the salad and yelped, 'WHAT THE FUCK!' We were both staring at it to make sure we weren't seeing things and it was a little green thing wiggling on top of a piece of kale," she said.

Reached by phone, a manager at the Chopt location was shocked to hear of the little wiggler: "I've never heard of a worm [in a salad] before," manager Lorrie Meade told us. After Lee and her coworker posted videos of the salad on Instagram, Chopt reached out to them about the incident:

Please know that we take this exceptionally seriously. It is an extremely rare occurrence that an insect will make it from the farm into a bowl of our salad. We receive, wash and prep all produce every morning and unfortunately, we did not catch this one. We pride ourselves on cleanliness, the freshest of produce and customer care and I'm sorry that we did not meet our high standard of service today.

"We are glad that they are proactive about it but... still will probably never step into a CHOPT again," Lee added. "We feel that they are sloppy!"

But the question on our minds: is this worm gross enough to turn you off from eating the salad? Or is a tiny bit of protein a fair price to pay for an affordable, quick meal? Are we all too sensitive about ingesting the occasional insect/worm? Or would this be enough to turn you off from eating at Chopt ever again? Have we all forgotten the timeless lessons of Fear Factor?

This is far from the first bug or worm incident at a NYC Chopt location—this wasn't even the first worm incident in a Chopt salad this year:

And who could forget this terrifying bugger trying to blend in with the grilled chicken and peppers in the Kebab Cobb. Or this little dude, who just wanted a cozy salad to nestle in to beat the summer heat:

The Rat Wrap (via Steven Henderson/Twitter)

Once you've seen rat wrap, a few worms in a salad seems like amateur hour. Anyway, if you really wanna travel down the wormhole, just search "Chopt bug" on Twitter. Here are but a few highlights of the genre: