More than 50 middle school students in Oregon were fed pretzels that were seasoned with crushed oven cleaner last fall, according to a newly filed lawsuit.
About 37 pretzels coated with Alto-Cham concentrated oven cleaner — an industrial-strength caustic chemical made with sodium hydroxide — were served during sixth-grade lunch at Fowler Middle School in Tigard, a suburb of Portland, on October 20, 2025, according to a nearly $1 million lawsuit filed last month.
More than 50 students ate all or part of the impacted pretzels, according to Tigard-Tualatin School District records obtained by Fox 12.
Sodium hydroxide is the main component in lye, which is used to make pretzels.
It is also the main incredient in oven cleaner.
To not know the difference between sodium chloride and sodium hydroxide is wild. Those poor kiddos.
That and I believe the lye used in pretzels and other foods like lutefisk has to be food grade. I make soap so I use lye quite regularly, but to mistake it for salt when it looks NOTHING LIKE IT is a very special kind of incompetent. My god if I were one of the parents I would be inconsolably angry, that’s so fucking dangerous!
The sodium hydroxide used to clean ovens can be food grade as well. The storing it not in extremely obvious labeled containers is what likely got an understaffed(having subs) kitchen in trouble here.
Kids these days are so spoiled with their designer sodium compounds. In my day we seasoned our food with elemental sodium and we were grateful (for a very short period).
The explosion was the best part
It was like PopRocks, but better.
Most people say sodium is salt , our kitchen workers are under educated because pay is so low
I mean if some dumbass put this in a non labeled container and put it next to where they were making pretzels, the standard cafeteria person is going to ask themself, is that salt or sugar, and then say… That’s not sugar. And I’ve gotten pretzels before that have salt packets shipped with them, and the salt does not look like granulated salt you use as table salt. So if you are in a rush (say enough so that you have to have called in a substitute like said scenario) I could understand someone mistaking it.
The fault is on whomever removed the substance from a clearly labeled container, and then again on whomever left it in the kitchen next to the oven which the pretzels were presumed baked in.
That made it a bit confusing but it doesn’t seem to be actual lye or related to actually making pretzels, it wasn’t like they used lye leftover from pretzel making as topping.