A TEENAGER FINISHING a roast beef sandwich at a fast-food chain chomped down on something tough that tasted like rubber, so he spat it out.

Turns out it tasted like finger. The fleshy, severed pad of an unfortunate employee’s finger, apparently.

Michigan boy Ryan Hart, 14, told the Jackson Citizen Patriot this week that once he got a good look at it, he knew right away what had been in the junior roast beef sandwich he was eating last Friday.

“I was like, ‘That (has) to be a finger,’” Hart said. “I was about to puke. It was just nasty.”

The employee at Arby’s apparently cut her finger on a meat slicer and left her station without immediately telling anyone, said Steve Hall, the environmental health director for the Jackson County health department. Her co-workers continued filling orders until they found out what had happened, he said.

John Gray, a spokesman for Atlanta-based Arby’s, released a statement apologising for what he described as an isolated and “unfortunate incident.”

Ryan’s mother, Jamie Vail, was incredulous. She and her friend, Joe Wheaton, had taken Ryan and his 11-year-old brother to the Arby’s drive-thru and she said she thought her son was joking when he exclaimed he had found a piece of a finger in his sandwich.

“Somebody loses a finger, and you keep sending food out the window? I can’t believe that,” said Vail. She and Wheaton said the severed section was about an eighth to a quarter-inch thick and at least one inch long.

Vail said she called 911 and met police at a local hospital, where her son’s blood was drawn and he was prescribed some medication. Ryan said he is feeling fine.

There have been a number of incidents in the US in recent years in which a restaurant worker’s accidentally severed flesh found its way into someone’s food.

In 2006, a diner at a TGI Friday’s in Indiana found part of a kitchen worker’s finger on his hamburger. The year before that, a North Carolina man bit into what he thought was candy in his frozen yogurt only to find it, too, belonged to a worker who had had an accident with a food-processing machine.