Man, talk about a bad day at the office. How would you like to be the PR person at Dairy Queen who comes into work and finds out that they have to draft an official company press release saying the following? “No, our restaurants do not use human meat in the preparation of our hamburgers.”

And yet, that’s precisely what happened one day not too long ago. (NY Post)

Dairy Queen has had to oddly clarify that the store’s food does not contain “human meat” after one of its South Carolina restaurants was swarmed by federal agents last week, sparking gruesome rumors online.

“At Dairy Queen, we are very proud of our 100 percent beef hamburgers,” the fast-food chain tweeted Friday. “We serve a high-quality hamburger with no additives or fillers.”

The statement was in response to a news story published by the Index-Journal, of Greenwood, SC, reporting that someone complained about “human meat being inside a burger” at the local Dairy Queen.

The weirdness behind this story doesn’t stop there. It appears that the entire “human meat” rumor was caused by one of the managers at the store who claimed that “somebody complained” about the burgers supposedly being the real-world equivalent of Soylent Green. He then told his story to a reporter from the local newspaper, the Index-Journal, and they ran with it.

The reporter even went so far as to interview the County Coroner and get a quote. He confirmed that there was “little to no chance” that Dairy Queen was selling human meat in their burgers.

As it turns out, the swarm of law enforcement descending on the restaurant (including the FBI and Homeland Security) had nothing to do with cannibalism. A couple of guys were allegedly running an illegal money transfer and/or laundering business out of the restaurant and were using a safe there to store hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. That’s quite different than the allegations blowing up on social media.

And yet they were forced to deal with this question on Twitter.

Hi Matthew! At DAIRY QUEEN, we are very proud of our 100% beef hamburgers. We serve a high-quality hamburger with no additives or fillers.

— Dairy Queen (@DairyQueen) August 23, 2019

Well, I suppose we can all rest easy knowing that it’s not a cannibal store. But even if the rumor was true, it would probably still be better than one of those plant-based Impossible Burgers.