The 7 Most Absurd Highway Food Spills We're Glad We Aren't Stuck Behind (Frozen Pizzas and Slimy Eels!)

Morning commutes can be hell. Between traffic, construction, and weather delays there’s no shortage of obstacles keeping you from making it to work on time.

But know what causes longer delays than a fender bender? A thousand pounds of food covering the roadway.

And while that may sound like something you're unlikely to encounter, news stories of semi-trucks getting into accidents and spilling their cargo pop up with surprising frequency. Don’t believe us? Check out some of the all-time most absurd semi-truck accidents involving food. (Just don’t read it while you’re driving.)

A semi-truck in Tacoma, WA made headlines (and caused an avalanche of bread puns on Twitter) when unseasonably warm weather caused the uncooked dough it was transporting to rise drastically and leak out the sides of the cargo area. The dough was heading to a farm where it was to be used to feed livestock, but instead it just managed to ooze out the back of the truck and onto the hot highway below.

What a waste of delicious dough.

This past July, in an event that can only be described as “all of our nightmares come to life” or possibly “a slimy, gooey, wriggling hellscape,” Oregon state police found themselves forced to deal with a spill of thousands of eel-like fish when a truck carrying them overturned on Highway 101. The 7,500 pounds of hagfish were heading to South Korea where they’re considered a delicacy—but alas, they never reached their destination. Fortunately no injuries were reported—other than, we assume, the mental anguish felt by the people who spent the day clearing thousands of eels/slime off a highway.

Another pizza delivery horror story—though this one dealt with frozen pies, and the “delivery” address was the middle lane of Interstate 30. During this incident, an Arkansas highway found itself littered with thousands of DiGiorno and Tombstone frozen pizzas after a semi-truck collided with a low overpass, tearing apart the trailer and sending the pies flying. Though no injuries occurred, reports confirmed that many of the boxes were run over/sitting in diesel fuel, meaning that thousands of pizza lives were needlessly lost forever.

May they all rest in pizza.

While 20 tons of pasta and Bolognese sauce sounds like a magical dream come true, or a special lunch promotion at Olive Garden, it turns out the reality is a much different story. British commuters learned that the hard way when a truck carrying the pasta was involved in an accident that sent its cargo flying all over the highway. For reasons unknown the pasta was not packaged (WTF?), and the goopy mess covered more than 100 yards of roadway, according to reports. Yikes.

You know what’s a great way to start your morning? A fresh glass of orange juice. You know what’s not a great way to start your morning? Overturning your tractor-trailer filled with thousands of unsecured oranges and seeing them go rolling out onto a California highway near San Diego like an unstoppable orange tidal wave. But sometimes you squeeze the most out of life, and sometimes life squeezes it out of you.

A British Columbia road turned into every vegetable-hating 7-year-old’s nightmare brought to life when a truck carrying thousands of pounds of green beans overturned and spilled its fresh picked contents all over Highway 17. Front loaders were brought in to haul away the soiled produce, and they worked wonders—reports from the scene say the overturn only caused a pretty minor delay in traffic.

While we wouldn’t exactly call low-cost ramen noodle packages fine dining, they’ve gotten us through enough late night study sessions and quick office lunches that we felt a twinge of heartache to hear about their involvement in a tractor trailer crash. A truck driver passing through North Carolina fell asleep at the wheel and hit a highway bridge, sending crates of ramen noodle packets flying. The driver was uninjured, but the thousands of damaged and destroyed noodle packets probably represented, like, tens of dollars in financial loss for the shipper.