The Time A Grifting Duo Tried To Scam Cracker Barrel By Dropping A Mouse In Some Soup
A customer saying, "Excuse me, waiter, there's a fly in my soup..." — either because there's an actual fly in their soup or because they put one there — is such an old-school joke that it's practically a cultural touchstone appearing in media from Looney Tunes to Sesame Street. It's an outdated joke, but it's one with which people are well familiar.
But what if your soup didn't supposedly contain a dead fly? What if it contained an entire dead mouse? That was the assertion of a mother and son at a Cracker Barrel in 2004. The problem is that their story was, from the beginning, clearly a hoax designed to extort Cracker Barrel for half a million dollars. And it was a hoax that, unlike many others, wound up costing the duo, who was ultimately convicted of extortion and sentenced to one year in prison. Don't mess with Cracker Barrel, apparently.
The claim was so laughably false from the beginning it's a surprise they even tried it
This isn't a case of a company bullying off a valid claim; a careless Cracker Barrel kitchen employee did not carelessly — or nefariously — drop a mouse in someone's soup. Nevertheless, that was the claim of 38-year-old Carla Patterson and her son, 22-year-old Ricky Patterson, who then filed a lawsuit demanding $500,000 from the company as compensation.
The pair might have gotten away with it if they were trying to scam a free dinner, but the second they made it a legal case, they should've realized Cracker Barrel would do its due diligence — and that's where the Pattersons ran into a wall. A necropsy conducted on the mouse determined it had died of a fractured skull and had no soup in its lungs, nor had it been cooked. All that evidence proved the mouse had to have been dropped into the soup after it was prepared (and after the mouse was already dead). The most likely cause at that point was the Pattersons themselves.
A jury agreed. When Cracker Barrel filed criminal charges, the pair were charged with conspiracy to commit extortion. Though they could have spent 10 years in prison, ultimately, they were only sentenced to one. Hilariously, though, they were also given a $2,500 fine in addition to their jail time, which just seems like tacking on insult to injury.
Dubious claims of foreign objects in food are nothing new
There have been a lot of claims of foreign objects in food that felt dubious, some of which resulted in legal action. You may recall a massively forwarded email chain in 2001 that claimed a woman had found a whole fried chicken head in her kids' McDonald's Mighty Wings. This one could potentially be true, as no lawsuit ultimately resulted from the claim, and McDonald's never directly refuted it. This story probably isn't why Mighty Wings flopped, but anything's possible.
The others, though, are a bit more dubious. In 2021, a comedian named Jensen Karp claimed to have found shrimp tails in his box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The company responded by claiming the (very clearly) shrimp tails were just accumulations of cinnamon sugar. It's not clear whether Karp put them there himself, but regardless, as no lawsuit was filed, the story eventually disappeared.
There was another case just recently, and this time, the legal department got involved. A Michigan man named Thomas Howie sued Olive Garden for a rat foot he supposedly found in his soup. While Olive Garden's parent company, Darden Restaurants, disputes this claim, the case remains ongoing.