The Cinnamon Toast Crunch shrimp-gate didn’t have to go viral

The gross object was tweeted by Los Angeles-based writer Jensen Karp, who said he found pieces of a crustacean in his cereal earlier this week. His thousands of followers responded — and so did Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

The back-and-forth quickly devolved into chaos. The cereal brand owned by General Mills responded via Twitter to Karp, saying that the shrimp-tail-like objects weren’t seafood, but an “accumulation of the cinnamon sugar that sometimes can occur when ingredients aren’t thoroughly blended.” It added: “We assure you that there’s no possibility of cross contamination with…