It’s not uncommon for proselytizers looking to “get the word out” to adopt a guerilla tactic of casually leaving leaflets or booklets in heavily trafficked areas for unsuspecting folks to find. I’m sure many of you, like me, have at one time or another found a copy of a Gideon’s Bible in the drawer of their hotel room. Then of course there were Chick Tracts, evangelical tracts published from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s by cartoonist Jack Chick, cautioning the reader against the evils of Dungeons & Dragons, homosexuality, witchcraft, and rock music—all tools of the devil. Not all “found” literature is overtly religious or spiritual, however. Consider the case of the Toynbee Tiles, messages of unknown origin found embedded in the asphalt of cities across North and South America believed to have originated in the mid-1980s and usually containing some variation of the phrase “Toynbee Idea in Movie 2001. Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter.” What does it mean? Theories abound, but nobody really knows, And to this day the mystery remains unsolved.

While these sorts of discoveries may prompt reactions from bemusement and annoyance to curiosity and wonder, they’re not typically cause for alarm; even if we find their contents strange or disagreeable, they’re not inherently dangerous and we don’t feel as though they’ve somehow violated our sense of privacy and safety—unlike urban legends of strangers hiding razor blades in Halloween candy or handing out poison apples a la The Wicked Queen. While folklorists such as Jan Brunvand assure us “Decades of annual X-raying of children’s Halloween treats … have failed to detect any such actual sabotage” (Brunvand 2001) and sociologist Joel Best, after decades of research, declared “I can’t find any evidence that any child has ever been injured by a contaminated treat picked up on Halloween,” people continue to fear what may be inside what they intend to put in their bodies. What would happen if some opportunistic individual decided to capitalize on people’s anxieties around food safety by hiding their tracts inside of groceries? Sound crazy? Well, a coworker of mine named Kristine recently shared a disturbing discovery she made following a recent trip to the grocery store: a small, folded-up piece of paper inside an otherwise inconspicuous Lunchables box.

The paper contained what can only be described as gibberish. Not like the coded messages of the Zodiac killer readable only by cipher, but semi-coherent conspiracy laden ramblings neatly typed on your basic white computer paper. The message, in so far as it made any sense, seemed a hodge-podge of every popular conspiracy theory: 

“SECRET societies’ (SS) ties to terro’m’/mass shoot’gs…go unreport’d. JFK/Lincoln/Wilson warn’d of SS. A secret sign/symb. Sys unites SS. Their symbs tie to Saturn, Lord o/t Rings/Time.”

That this message existed at all was bizarre enough, but even more shocking was the discovery that this was not an isolated incident; reports of the exact same message having been discovered go back at least two years. 

The first report I found was a Reddit post from two years ago saying, “Bought a vest at a Cabela’s store and this note was in the front right pocket. Not sure what this means, and why it was planted there. Can anyone shed light on this?” In the thread, someone replies “pretty sure I’ve seen this exact picture of this exact little piece of paper about 5 months ago where someone claimed it came in a box from Amazon.” Someone also mentioned having found the same message in a pair of pants from the Salvation Army, and another Redditor claimed to have seen the same message tacked to a tree in an unspecified park. 

At the same time as the Redditor’s discoveries, residents of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, were finding this message in their groceries—exactly where Kristine found it two years later. As the Coal Region Canary reports “The folded-up piece of paper … was found inside a box of Infant Tylenol by a local mother on Wednesday, June 3,” and another woman living over the “Schuylkill-Lebanon County line” found the note “inside a box of Duncan Hines French Vanilla cake mix.” Upon further digging, I discovered this same message was being discovered all across the state. The Coal Speaker reported that grocery shoppers were discovering the message in “Products such as chocolate bars, San Giorgio pasta, dog food, and other various sealed boxes” at Sweet Arrow Lake in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, but also Pottsville, Tamaqua, and Ashland. Venturing into the comments section (wading through the usual Dumpster fire of political discourse) revealed people claiming to have found the same message from as far as Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio. 

Given what little we know, how much of this mystery can we solve? First, let’s go over the facts. We know, based on the photographs provided of the message, that there are at least two variations, one with the word “LIES” indenting the left side of the text block and one without. Otherwise, the contents of the message itself appear identical in each case. We know that the message has been found in a tri-state area spanning from Ohio to Pennsylvania to Maryland, and the message seems to have begun appearing in 2020; the majority of messages were discovered in 2020, and at least one has been discovered this year. In most of the reported cases (there may be some that I am unaware of), the messages were found inside of factory-sealed boxes with no evidence of tampering.

We can speculate whether this is the work of a single individual or more and what their motives might be, but I don’t believe we have enough evidence to generate hypotheses. We should therefore limit our inquiry to questions we believe we may answer with reasonable confidence. I decided to examine how the messages are getting inside of packages. When are they being inserted? Would they have to have been inserted sometime prior to factory sealing, or was it possible for someone to have inserted them after they were factory sealed without damaging the boxes in any obvious way?

There are some problems with the hypothesis of this having been done before the boxes were sealed. First, based on the geography and the fact that not all the specified grocery items were from the same manufacturer or were dry goods (some were refrigerated), they wouldn’t have originated from the same facility. This would necessarily mean that more than one individual would have to be involved; this doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, but applying Occam’s Razor, it is less likely than this being the work of a single person. Second, if it is possible to insert the messages after the boxes are factory sealed, again, preferring the simplest explanation with the least number of assumptions, I would argue that it is more likely to be the case that this was done in the store rather than someone either at the warehouse or involved in the distribution having been responsible. Warehouse workers are monitored closely and work on tight schedules, so it’s less likely someone in a warehouse would have the free time to go around inserting these messages, let alone do so unnoticed. With delivery drivers, there’s the additional problem of the packages already being loaded onto pallets and shrink wrapped, making it virtually impossible to access. Therefore, I argue it’s more likely that these messages are being inserted after the boxes are factory sealed and on the grocery store shelves. 

That leaves the question of how this could be accomplished, and the only way to answer definitively would be to replicate the process. So that’s exactly what I did. I did not rack up an extensive grocery bill purchasing all the items people have reported finding these messages inside just to test them. Demonstrating on just one package, however, proves that it is at least possible to do so and, therefore, plausible that the other messages ended up inside those boxes the same way. 

Kristine had sent me photographs of the Lunchables box she bought and the message she found contained inside. After confirming with her the message was printed on your basic computer paper (and not something thicker), I used her photos as a reference to create a square of paper of the same length and width, folded to exactly the same size, and had her compare my recreation to the original.

Next, I went out and bought myself a Lunchables (these specific boxes are all the same size). Now, how could I get the message inside the box without damaging it or breaking the factory seal?

Well, it turned out to be much easier than I anticipated. Pinching the ends of the box with enough force opened up a space beneath the outer flaps. Looking inside, I could see there are two inner flaps that are roughly an inch long (these become easier to see once the box is already opened). With a sufficiently flat and long object (I was in my kitchen and had a paring knife close by), it’s quite easy to push the folded message past the inner flap and drop it inside the box without causing any obvious damage to the box.

After opening the box to see where it landed, I sent Kristine a photo and asked her to confirm where she had found the message. To my delight, my experiment almost perfectly replicated how she had found the message; she found hers between the two food packs, but wedged much deeper than mine. However, she confirmed she had ordered her groceries online and picked them up, meaning they had been handled by multiple people before her and likely been jostled around. Had I vigorously shaken my box before opening it, my test paper would’ve ended up just as deep inside.

Based on this, I believe the simplest conclusion is that someone is going into grocery stores and inserting these messages into factory-sealed boxes without compromising them. However, it’s also possible that anyone involved in the process of manufacturing, packaging, or distributing these products may have placed the messages there. The average consumer doesn’t think much about how exactly their groceries end up on the store shelf, where the groceries came from, or how many hands they may have passed through before being picked up and placed inside your cart. With all that said, how worried should people be about their groceries? I asked Ben Radford, CSI Research Fellow, member of the American Folklore Society, and author of books on mass hysteria and urban legends such as “Bad Clowns” and “Tracking the ChupaCabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore,” and his response was:

People get uneasy when anything they buy seems to be used, touched, or altered without their knowledge. We like to think that a new product just goes from the factory to the store, but of course there are many opportunities for people to add, remove or change the contents. A note in a jacket pocket is one thing, but a note inside food packaging is another, and makes us wonder what else might have been done—especially by someone who endorses a rambling, crazed screed or manifesto. So though there’s no clear threat, it’s unnerving. People don’t need to worry about checking their groceries; they are in far greater danger of ordinary food poisoning caused by bacteria or undercooked food than anything intentionally placed there to harm someone. (Radford 2022)

It’s not just Listeria that presents a greater threat than kooky notes left in your groceries. What people really ought to be worried about going into public places such as grocery stores (and here I would like to encourage as many people as possible to follow Kristine’s example and shop online or do pickup) is risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2. Despite the fact that after two years, we’ve all grown tired of dealing with or hearing about the global pandemic, and news of COVID-19 has recently been eclipsed in the media by novel stories such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the risk of Coronavirus infection for the unvaccinated and vulnerable is still present and ought to be taken seriously. According to CNN, China has experienced its worse surge in COVID-19 cases yet, far past the peak of Wuhan cases in 2020. As of April 6, “close to 20,000 new cases” had been reported. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and current President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, recently declared that “classical herd immunity may not apply” to SARS-CoV-2 and that “controlling COVID-19 by increasing herd immunity may be an elusive goal.” So, while it’s perfectly understandable to be afraid of what you might find in your groceries, there’s more to be afraid of floating around in the air or on surfaces that you can’t see. And unlike finding messages in your groceries, there are actually preventative steps that can be taken to protect yourself from COVID-19. Get your damn shot.

References

Brunvand, Jan. 2001. Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. W.W. Norton & Company. New York, NY.

Radford, Ben. 2022. Personal Communication. April 4.