‘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
Granted I’ve never been injured, but I’ve gotten small pieces of bone shards several times throughout my life from shredded chicken type stuff.
I dunno if they refused to pay medical bills because that’d be fucked.
But if you kill a creature, cook and debone it, yeah, occasionally a bit of bone will make it through.
You can still call it boneless, because you knew you were buying meat from a creature that normally has bones and an effort has been made to remove said bones.
I hate to say I side with the Ohio Supreme Court but I think I do.
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.
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.
“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.
All the fast food workers in Ohio should start making sure that they they get some good bones in there every time they go for fast food chicken.
Funny headline aside, semantics and trying to understand expected meanings of words and phrases is fucky and makes for an interesting case. Per the article the court decision was only 4-3 (i.e., close), and the dissent seemed – as a person who admittedly is not well-versed in the language normally used by Ohio’s Supreme Court – to be pretty strongly opinionated.
From the snippets in the article I find it pretty easy to sympathize with both sides of the argument!
edit: the full text is available here (the original unarchived source is being hammered by curious people) - you can download the file to read it in full-res
The question seems to be: “did the restaurant exercise reasonable duty of care”. There is a lot more to the case than the fun-but-sensationalized headline and even article.
I agree with the dissent in this case. What kind of Alice in wonderland bullshit are we living in where when you say boneless, you actually mean “THERE MAY BE BONES OVER AN INCH LONG IN THEM!”??
Words have meaning. It really shows how much these fuckers are cutting corners. If anything it’s negligence for allowing a product such as this to reach the customer, get lodged in his throat, slice open his esophagus, get infected, and require two surgeries.
If the boneless wings had glass in them, would they be held negligent?
Here’s the bit of dissent from the article.
"Dissenting Justices argued that a jury should have been allowed to determine whether the restaurant and suppliers were negligent, and called Deters’ reasoning “utter jabberwocky.”
“When they read the word ‘boneless,’ they think that it means ‘without bones,’ as do all sensible people,” wrote Justice Michael P. Donnelly in dissent."
I can understand tiny pieces of bone making it in there, but a 1 and 3/8ths inch bone. That’s nearly the length of the wing! It just seems like negligence on the meat processor (not necessarily on the restaurant)
I’d say the restaurant is in charge of final QC. They’re handling it while cooking. This doesn’t absolve the producer, but, they do have an obligation to serve safe food.
But I’m also pretty irritated by supposed wing joints passing off frozen Cisco foods wings as their own when all they do is heat them in a microwave and toss some sauce.
They toss the frozen wings into the fryer so that the breading stays crispy… The microwave ruins breading making it rubbery or mushy.
Equally as amazing as the processor missing a 1 inch bone is someone chewing so little that they didn’t notice the bone. You’re not a snake chew your food.
Much like compressive or tensile forces, responsibility is perfectly capable of fully inhabiting every step of a series.
So if you put a linear stack of styrofoam blocks (negligible weight but some structural strength) and then put a 10 lb weight on top, every block in the stack experiences 10 lbs of force.
In the same way, I think every person along such a chain of custody can each, independently, be held fully responsible for a fuckup that makes its way down that line.
