RE: WDM Olive Garden Angie sent this email to me!!!!!!!!! It was her co-worker! A girl I work with and her friend went to Olive Garden this weekend; I believe Thursday or Friday night. Amber’s friend did not get what she ordered correctly so she sent the food back. Sunday she woke up and had red bumps all over inside her mouth. She went to the doctor and after many questions and food allergy tests she brought in what she had ate (she had left over’s at home) the doctor tested it. The food tested positive for three different types of semen, Amber’s friend had Syphilis in her mouth from the food at Olive Garden here in WDSM… Anyone up for dinner this weekend, I know a great place! AngieComments: Urban legends about restaurant food contamination abound, and a favorite sub-motif is the intentional adulteration of food items with bodily fluids. In the present case the adulterant is alleged to be "three different types of semen" -- meaning, presumably, the semen of three different men -- and the location an Olive Garden restaurant in West Des Moines, Iowa. We are told that the female victim developed sores in her mouth identified by doctors as symptoms of an STD (sexually transmitted disease), namely syphilis. The source of these allegations is a forwarded email circulating since July 2007. Health officials and the restaurant's managers say no such incident took place. According to the Iowa Department of Public Health and Darden Restaurants, Inc. (owner of the Olive Garden chain), the West Des Moines restaurant's sanitation record is spotless, and the email tale has zero basis in fact. "You could just look at it and say, 'Gee, I think some teenager sat around and tried to make up the grossest story they could make up and this is what they came up with,'" state epidemiologist Patricia Quinlisk told KCCI-TV News in Des Moines. She advises recipients of the message to simply discard it. Olive Garden rumor dates back to 1999 Interestingly enough, while this exceptionally nasty rumor may be new to Iowa, it has plagued Olive Garden restaurants across the U.S. for the better part of a decade. Far from lending credence to the claims, however, the fact that the same narrative has been repeated again and again in different locations with only slight variations in the details identifies it as a textbook example of an urban legend. The following variant was contributed by a reader in San Francisco in February 1999. Note that the victim is again female and the restaurant is Olive Garden, but the STD she supposedly contracted is herpes, not syphilis.