When Australian farmer Reece Smoker announced that he had found a live frog in a bag of lettuce, his housemates did not believe him.
Smoker was preparing a steak and salad dinner Saturday for the three people sharing his house in Esperance, Western Australia, when he discovered the frog among the leaves inside the sealed plastic bag he bought at the supermarket, his roommate Laura Jones said Tuesday.
“He’s like, ‘Bro, there’s a frog in the lettuce.’ “We said, ‘No, you’re taking the microphone,’ like this isn’t real,” Jones told the AP. Taking the microphone is a slang term for trying to trick someone.
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Smoker brought the bag into the lounge room to show Jones and her partner, Billy Lou Pine.
“There’s obviously a little frog hiding, and yeah, we all had a little laugh about that,” Jones said.
Le Pine said they named the frog Greg before releasing it into a pond near the house.
“We thought we’d give him a little send-off tune while we played ‘Crazy Frog’ for him,” Le Payne told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Crazy Frog is a Swedish CGI animated character and Eurodance musician.
Smoker and his partner Lily Ashby bought lettuce from a Woolworths supermarket in Esperance on the same day Greg was discovered.
Five years ago, a shopper encountered a three-meter (10-foot) non-venomous diamond python on the shelf of a Woolworths store in Sydney. Also in 2021, a shopper discovered a venomous pale-headed snake wrapped in plastic with lettuce at an ALDI supermarket in Sydney.
Woolworths said the frog in the salad was an isolated incident and no other similar cases had been reported. “Our teams are investigating this matter with our suppliers as a priority,” a Woolworths statement said.
Woolworths apologized to the family and provided a replacement bag of lettuce.
& Edition 2026 The Canadian Press
