It’s no secret that fast food is bad for you, but it seems to have sunk to a new low. As you may or may not have already heard, a woman from Santa Clara County in San Jose, Calif. found a hearty 1.5 inches of human finger in her chili as she was dining at Wendy’s last month. It is a truly amazing story, especially because I have no idea why anyone in their right mind would go to Wendy’s when they could be going to White Castle instead. But aside from that shocker, the finger’s presence has several startling implications.

One rumor that has circulated, but has yet to be confirmed, is that the woman planted the finger in the chili to create a lawsuit against Wendy’s. The rumor states that she took the finger from her dead aunt. If that’s true, I must speculate as to how she procured the finger. A “Tale of Two Cities”- style graveyard robbery, perhaps? Or maybe, upon her aunt’s death, she secretly cut the finger off the corpse, as you never know when you’re going to need a severed finger.

The only comparable incident prior to the Chili Finger happened in November 2000, when a woman from Virginia found an entire, breaded, deep-fried Chicken McHead inside her box of Chicken McNuggets. The primary legal difference between the cases is that the deep-fried head formerly belonged to a chicken, so the company got off with a large fine as opposed to a police investigation.

Thus far, police have found no evidence pointing to the legitimacy of the “dead aunt” rumor. That being the case, one must wonder where the finger came from. Human fingers aren’t generally found lying around on the ground, and chances are if someone alive were missing a finger he or she would have noticed it by now. If an employee had cut off his or her finger by accident, even somehow not noticing the extreme pain and bloody stump, chances are a co-worker would have mentioned the fact that a hand was gushing copious amounts of blood.

Apparently the finger did not come from an employee, though. Wendy’s officials have publicly stated that they’ve checked all their employees in the San Jose area, and none of them are missing a finger. Additionally, there were no reported accidents or hand problems reported from Wendy’s suppliers.

So where did the mystery digit come from? A woman in Nevada, who had to have her finger partially amputated after she was attacked by her domesticated spotted leopard (the only pet more dangerous is the domesticated spotted wolverine), has made a claim that the finger might be hers. The hospital managed to misplace her finger after it was removed, so it could have made its way to San Jose, but she only lost three-fourths of an inch of finger, and the Chili Finger was a whopping 1.5 inches. As Johnny Cochran would have said: “If the finger is too long, the owner’s claim is clearly wrong.”

The Santa Clara County coroner’s office did a fingerprint analysis and came up with no leads. If the finger’s owner cannot be found on public record, and the true owner refuses to be discovered, the only alternative is that the owner has been careful to keep his or her fingerprints a secret. The answer could be found in the dark underbelly of fast food chains: the Burger Mafia. There’s a secret underground war going on between the major fast food chains, and only the careful work of neutral peacekeepers has kept it from spilling out onto the streets. The finger may have easily come from the hand of a Wendy’s agent who had been caught peddling Frostys on acknowledged Culver’s turf.

Wendy’s also has strong ties to Coca-Cola, a company that’s recently been publicly accused of hiring hit men to remove troublesome union workers in Colombia. If the draconian justice practiced by the Burger Mafia holds true, there soon might be a terrible addition to a customer’s next bowl of Culver’s frozen custard.

The other, more mundane option is that the “secret ingredient” in Wendy’s chili’s isn’t quite so secret anymore. It would help to explain the funky taste. Wendy’s officials insist that the finger was added after the ingredients were mixed, but that could easily be a desperate cover-up while they search for a new source for their chili meat.

In the age of the Enormous Omelet Sandwich, which can provide you with your daily supply of fat before most college students even wake up, this incident should make one dining choice very clear to the American public: Eat at White Castle.