When you were little, you might have terrorized your friends (or been terrorized by your friends) pretending that your spaghetti noodles were worms. But what if that actually happened? According to a new federal lawsuit, a mom and her young child say their canned pasta dinner came with a side of live, squirming parasites.
‘Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs!’
Campbell's SpaghettiOs has been an American childhood classic meal for over half a century, and the brand is still going strong. But for one Florida family, that familiar red‑and‑white label allegedly delivered something very far from comfort food. Two years ago, Mary Hubbard of Okeechobee did what countless parents have done on a tired weeknight: she opened a can of Campbell’s SpaghettiOs for her kid and herself. Her daughter is identified only as “P.L.” in court papers to preserve her privacy.
“What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?” Or, for the Hubbards, what could have been worse than opening a can of SpaghettiOs to find live worms in them? Only realizing it after they’d eaten half the can. Mary says at some point during the meal, she spotted what looked like live, worm‑like parasites writhing in the remaining pasta. She grabbed her phone to record multiple videos of the organisms moving around in the sauce. She says she did nothing unusual with the product — only opened and heated it.
Both mother and daughter allegedly became seriously ill after consuming the contaminated SpaghettiOs. Mary claims she developed a parasitic infection and significant gastrointestinal illness, followed by sepsis, hepatic injury and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and iron‑deficiency anemia severe enough to require intravenous iron infusions, along with chronic PTSD tied to the incident. P.L. is alleged to have suffered intense abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, as well as a parasitic infection treated with the antiparasitic medication Albendazole, plus an adjustment disorder with mixed disturbance of emotions and conduct.
Justice Is Served
Mamma Hubbard was not about to take her spaghetti dinner sitting down. Under federal law, food isn’t just “gross” or “unappetizing”; it can be legally “adulterated.” The lawsuit leans on the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act’s definition of adulterated food, which includes products that contain filthy or decomposed substances, are unfit for food, or were handled under unsanitary conditions that could make them dangerous. The family argues that a can of pasta allegedly containing live parasites falls squarely within that category and that Campbell and Walmart had a duty to keep anything meeting that definition far from a child’s dinner plate.
Mary and co‑parent Gregory Lovell filed a lawsuit in federal district court, laying out their allegations against not just Campbell Soup Company, but its supply arm and the retail giant that sold them the can. According to the complaint, Hubbard bought the SpaghettiOs at a local Walmart Supercenter. In the lawsuit, Walmart is named as a co‑defendant alongside Campbell’s, on the theory that everyone in the chain, from factory to store shelf, played a role in putting parasites on the family’s dinner table.
The case asks for more than $75,000 in damages, which is the minimum needed to land in federal court based on diversity of citizenship. But the family is signaling that the real stakes are much higher. They accuse Campbell and Walmart of designing, making, distributing, and selling a canned pasta product that was “adulterated, defective, and unfit for human consumption,” and of failing to catch or prevent the contamination before it reached consumers. And because Walmart allegedly sold the specific can at issue, the complaint says the retailer shares responsibility for the consequences of what was inside.
Tort Theory: Strict Liability
One of the Hubbards’ core arguments is pretty simple: if a sealed can of mass‑produced pasta reaches your pantry allegedly full of parasites, something has to be wrong with the product itself, not with how you used it. That’s where strict product liability, a theory of tort law, comes in against both Campbell’s and Walmart.
In their complaint, the family says that the can Mary opened was “defective and unreasonably dangerous” when it left the company’s control because it was contaminated with worms or parasites. Unlike negligence, this theory doesn’t turn on whether anyone was careless. In a strict‑liability tort claim, the law doesn’t require the plaintiff to reconstruct the exact point of failure on the factory floor. It’s enough to argue that the product, as sold, was unsafe for its ordinary use (being eaten) and that this defect directly caused harm (the Hubbards’ physical and psychological injuries).
Contract Theory: Breach of Implied Warranty
The Hubbards also lean on a related but legally distinct theory from the world of sales and contracts: breach of the implied warranty of merchantability. Whenever a company sells food, the law quietly layers on a promise that the product will be of “merchantable” quality and “fit for its ordinary purpose.” For SpaghettiOs, that ordinary purpose is very basic: being safe to eat, especially for kids.
By alleging that the can they bought was contaminated at the time of sale and “unfit for human consumption,” the Hubbards are essentially saying Campbell and Walmart broke that built‑in sales promise the moment the product hit the shelf. Unlike strict liability, it’s framed as a failure to deliver conforming goods under commercial law. Even if every internal checklist was followed, a product that arrives allegedly full of live worms simply isn’t living up to the minimum quality the law expects from a routine grocery‑store purchase. This gives the family a separate path to recovery under contract law, even if their tort law claim fails.
What’s Next on the Menu
For now, the case is in its early stages. Campbell and Walmart will have their chance to respond, test the evidence, and argue over what really was in that can and how it got there. If the parties don’t agree to a settlement to nip the case in the bud, a jury may eventually be asked to decide whether this was an unfortunate one‑off or a legally defective product.
In any case, for the Hubbards, the words “Uh‑Oh, SpaghettiOs!” will never land as a harmless jingle again.
