USDA Inspected golf balls in your supermarket freezer

It was on the news recently – a North Carolina company recalled bags of frozen hash brown potatoes because there could be traces of — not listeria, not mold, not even ptomaine— but material from golf balls.

Golf balls?

According to the report, McCain Foods USA's recall notice on the US Food & Drug Administration site says the hash browns could be "contaminated with extraneous golf ball materials" that "may have been inadvertently harvested with potatoes used to make this product."

I’ve always wondered where golf balls came from. For all I know, they grow on trees. It seems they’re harvested, in this instance, along with potatoes. Nice crop of golf balls growing over there. I wonder how many golf balls they get per bushel?

Now I’m not much of a cook, but I would think I could whip up a batch of hash browns without involving a trip to the country club. You shred some potatoes, add some onions and salt and pepper and fry them.

I’ve got one of those mandolin gadgets for shredding and slicing. Seems to me that a potato would slide over the blade fairly easily, but a golf ball? Not so much. Once when I was slicing a cucumber my finger slid over the blade easily enough, which required a trip to the doctor. But I would think a golf ball might bend the blade and bounce off the counter. Even a sharp knife would be no match for a golf ball.

Maybe you have to boil them first, you think?

This whole situation brings up many questions. Did someone check the golf balls for eyes when they were planting potatoes? I can understand mistaking a golf ball for a chunk of seed potato. They’re about the same size.

Who plants potatoes that close to a golf course? How many golfers are so bad at the game their balls land in the potato patch? I know from nothing about the game of golf, but I’ve never heard of a ball landing in the spuds although landing in the rough sounds familiar.

Didn’t anyone notice during the harvest that some potatoes had Spalding stamped on them? Didn’t anyone in the kitchen notice some of those spuds were already peeled and had dimples on them when they came in from the field?  

"Consumption of these products may pose a choking hazard or other physical injury to the mouth," says the notice of the voluntary recall.

I wonder if the golf balls are gluten free?

There have been no reported injuries, according to the company.

I’ll bet the cooks and the quality control inspectors are really teed off about this.