The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that a man who nearly died after choking on a bone in his "boneless wings" should have expected bones to be in them. A state legislator is so outraged that he plans to change state law.
Fuck it, why make sure that words mean anything! Just allow everyone to lie and be dishonest all the time with no repercussions. I'm sure society will do just fine.
This is an implied warranty of merchantability issue. They said boneless and it had a bone. In your watermelon example if you were hospitalized it'd be a valid claim to make.
This reminds me of an interesting article I read about unintended consequences from rules like this.
Advocates for families coping with allergies lobbied for years to have sesame added to the list of major allergens.
Under the new law, enforced by the Food and Drug Administration, companies must now explicitly label sesame as an ingredient or separately note that a product contains sesame.
If the ingredients don’t include sesame, companies must take steps to prevent the foods from coming in contact with any sesame, known as cross-contamination.
Officials at Olive Garden said that starting this week, the chain is adding “a minimal amount of sesame flour” to the company’s famous breadsticks “due to the potential for cross-contamination at the bakery.”
Chick-fil-A has changed its white bun and multigrain brioche buns to include sesame, while Wendy’s said the company has added sesame to its French toast sticks and buns.
United States Bakery, which operates Franz Family Bakeries in California and the Northwest, notified customers in March that they would add a small amount of sesame flour to all hamburger and hot dog buns and rolls “to mitigate the risk of any adverse reactions to sesame products.”
If the ingredients don’t include sesame, companies must take steps to prevent the foods from coming in contact with any sesame, known as cross-contamination.
Is this why soy is in fucking everything?! Because companies would rather add it for a few cents and say it contains it versus spending dollars to prevent its inclusion?
I think this is a good decision, and you always have to chew food for it to be safe, boneless or otherwise. There is no processing method (human or machine) that can reliably remove every bone or bone fragment, so the practical effect of the opposite outcome will be restaurants putting disclaimers that boneless products might contain bone.
It will be no safer for consumers, and basically no different for restaurants, except this specific restaurant will be badly hurt by being the first one to have a customer incur significant medical expenses from this problem. It will just be the raw/undercooked warning part 2, and we will slowly work our way to a page of disclaimers in every menu.
Yeah, no. It's clear you didn't look at the actual situation. The bone in question was almost an inch and a half long.
This wasn't a small piece of bone, like a sliver or splinter or fragment like they keep wanting to refer to it. This was straight up just a bone the manufacturer didn't remove. This is clear negligence regardless of what one bullshit judge says.
Tiny pieces of bone will get through manufacturing. This isn't that despite what they want to say. That characterization is bullshit on the level of the McDonald's hot coffee propaganda.
I agree with the overall idea, but this wasn't one judge it was the majority (4-3).
Even when all parties do the best we can reasonably expect on occasion a bone will slip through. But when that happens and someone suffers injury because of it they deserve restitution if they specifically ordered a boneless product.
The court didn't look at the breach of warranty claim. Which was probably the best argument in this case.
There's a lot of space between a food that's dangerous to touch, and foods that require effort to eat safely.
A warning that the coffee is hot isn't enough to meaningfully disclose that the coffee will do severe damage if you touch it, while a disclaimer that boneless wings may contain bone fragments does enough to disclose that there may be bone fragments. Lots of other foods have bones and bone fragments, and are eaten in near perfect safety very frequently. There are no other foods routinely served so hot that they will cause burns, specifically because they are always unsafe.
While I agree that the ruling is pretty ridiculous, the guy sounds like a human vacuum and caused his own problems:
He had cut up his wing into thirds, eating the first two pieces of it normally. On his third one, Berkheimer felt like something went down the wrong “pipe,” the court documents said.....Doctors found a 1 and 3/8 inch chicken bone in his throat, one that tore open the wall of his esophagus.
How the fuck do you not notice that you're eating a nearly 1.5" (38mm) bone?! 1.5" is literally the length of the tong tine on a metal fork (I had laying around after typing up the above and measured it just for the hell of it haha) or probably a sewing needle.
If there's even the tiniest bit of gristle or something in my meat I immediately spit it out, dude straight up swallowed a freaking chicken bone.
edit: apparently the human vacuums got offended by this. Put another way that's like putting half a toothpick in your meat and then not noticing it in your mouth