If there’s one quality people don’t usually look for in their food, it’s movement.
Even if you were being wined and dined by Heston Blumenthal you’d likely be horrified to see some element of your meal try to make a break for it.
But that’s exactly what one restaurant diner experienced when some meat appeared to crawl off her plate.
The image speaks for itself: what in the David Cronenberg is going on there?
Evoking scenes of a zombie apocalypse, this thoroughly unappetising scene had the diner and her fellow restaurant-goers thoroughly freaked out.
While it might not convince you to put it back on your plate, there’s a sensible explanation as to what caused this bizarre reanimation, and thankfully it’s got nothing to do with zombification.
The cause can be put down to high salt exposure, as it turns out.
Neurons in the meat chunk managed to react to the sodium ions present in the salt and soy sauce it was served in, and by some fluke those neurons still had a connection to the surrounding muscle tissue.
The ions sent a signal to the muscle to contract, making it look as though it had come alive.
It’s kind of like the old frog’s legs experiment, where a gentle current will make the otherwise dead legs move.
As it turns out, the meat in question appeared to come from a frog.
It’s not quite magic, but it’s close enough.
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No matter how sensible the explanation, seeing some supposedly dead flesh come back to life will do your appetite very few favours.
Fact-checking website Snopes also did a deep dive into it at the time, and said: "This video appears genuine and shows a freshly cut piece of raw meat spasming."
They added that the meat in question did appear to be frog and not chicken.
Featured Image Credit: Getty Images / Luc Teboul
Rachael Davis