‘Boneless’ chicken wings can have bones, the Ohio Supreme Court says
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/25/nx-s1-5052004/boneless-chicken-wings-ohio-supreme-court
A guy ate boneless wings and got a bone stuck in his throat leading to multiple surgeries so he sued. But he didn’t notice when it happened?
The longer I think about this the more I agree with the decision. It sounds dumb, there shouldn’t be bones, but if you’re chopping up a chicken breast with the rib bones still attached, I could see how a bone could accidentally make its way into a nugget. So I can understand what they mean by saying it’s a cooking style.
“Boneless” is not a “style” in the same way that a sauce can be different. If you ordered a porterhouse and got a NY strip, that’s not a different style- it’s a different cut of meat. (They’re opposite sides of a T bone.) saying a NY strip is a “style” of porterhouse isn’t anymore right.
If you order “boneless” wings, you expect them to be without bones. (This is both true of the final customer as well as the restaurant.). Expecting the customer at a restaurant to check their food to make sure it’s safe is weird. Unless they get to walk in the back and check everything, they can’t be reasonably expected to know that “oh hey, we might have shit QC.”
Ultimately, the restaurant had a duty of care to ensure the food was safe. And guess what? So did the supplier. They’re both negligent.
Kinda like the woman who sued McDonalds for hot coffee, and then people were like “DUH! COFFEE IS HOT!!!”
But it turns out she was right to sue. Coffee should be hot, but not lava coffee cup melting hot.
And worse on the coffee one, they found McDonald’s kept it boiling hot so patrons would drink less of it in the store waiting for it to cool and they’d leave before getting a refill. In short, McDonald’s made it uncomfortably hot to save money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants
The case. She only wanted her medical bills covered. Instead she got a nation-wide hate campaign against her.
I disagree. We shouldn’t carve exceptions into the law for carelessness, IMO. If bones are making it through the deboning process, then the deboning process is inadequate. The solution is to do better at deboning, not to loosen the requirements on how you label the product.
If anything, the legislation this should’ve brought about is one that puts a higher requirement on what can or cannot be called “boneless”. Words have meaning, and if we just pretend they don’t, people get hurt. Hell, we have a stricter legal definition for “cheese” than “boneless”. Nobody’s going to injure themselves on a slice of Kraft because they mistook it for real cheese, but you can seriously hurt yourself by eating something that was promised to be boneless and that turns out to be untrue.
We aren’t really carving an exception though. The condition of something being free of another substance is always a percentage chance.
My hand sanitizer only kills 99.99% of germs. Should it not be allowed to be called hand sanitizer because it cannot kill all of them? What should it be called? Hand almost-sanitizer? Those germs could get me pretty sick if I lose the cosmic lottery.
There’s always a point in reality where “good enough” is actually good enough.
I’m not actually saying this company has or hasn’t met that standard, I’m not an expert in poultry production techniques, but saying something needs to be 100% perfect to be sold doesn’t make things safer it just means it’d be illegal to debone wings without grinding up the chicken. I dunno the actual odds but it sounds like you’re already more likely to be struck by lightning than this occurring, and I’m still willing to go outside while its raining.
My hand sanitizer only kills 99.99% of germs. Should it not be allowed to be called hand sanitizer because it cannot kill all of them?
I’d agree with this comparison if the ruling meant that they had to advertise their wings as “~99.9% boneless” the same way hand sanitizer labels itself as being ~99.9% effective.
Your hand sanitizer doesn’t advertise germ-free, it advertises 99.9% germ free. It’d be a problem if they advertised it as germ free, and it wasn’t
99.9% boneless wings, sure. That’s fine. You expect a leftover bone here and there. Who the fuck is gonna buy 99.9% boneless wings, though? No one. You know that, I know that, and advertisers know that. So they label it in a misleading factor to sell more.
