So you mean boneless nuggets can actually have bones? That’s what the Ohio Supreme Court ruled. This is why we can’t have nice things!
It’s official: The number of things we can truly count on has just dropped by one! The Ohio Supreme Court says you can’t assume that boneless nuggets are certain to be without bones.
The ruling ended a lawsuit filed by a man who claimed he suffered serious injury when he swallowed a chicken bone. The bone, his lawsuit alleged, was in a boneless chicken nugget.
In a 4-3 decision, the state’s Supreme Court ruled lower courts were correct to dismiss his case against a restaurant and chicken suppliers.
Writing for the Court majority, Justice Joseph T. Deters explained that “boneless wings” are a cooking style and not a guarantee that fragments of bones would not be present in the dish. He explained that a food seller is not liable when a customer could reasonably expect and guard against a hazardous substance in food. A customer’s “reasonable expectation” is formed in part by whether the “injurious substance in the food is foreign to or natural to the food,” he noted.
I find one part particularly curious. In a dissenting opinion, another justice criticized the majority opinion. He said he believed a jury should decide what a “reasonable” customer should expect. Instead, he said, the majority “oddly declares that “boneless” means “you should expect bones.”
But that’s not the way I read it at all. Saying a customer could — and should — realize that chickens do, by nature, have bones isn’t the same as saying he should expect bones. It merely says he should expect there could be bones.
There’s a difference there.
Not quite so laughing a matter
It’s easy to chuckle at the notion that someone would lose a case like this.
But there’s always two sides to a story. The victim’s side, however, is surprisingly terrifying. The man said he was having his usual order at a chicken restaurant in Ohio when he felt something in his throat.
He thought nothing of it. But three days later, he said he felt feverish and ended up in the emergency room. There, doctors discovered a piece of a wishbone from one of the wings lodged in his throat and punctured his esophagus.
The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the puncture caused life-threatening infections, two medically induced comas, a two-month hospital stay and lasting heart and lung damage.
All of that from a 1 3/8-inch sliver of bone!
Buyer beware? Even with boneless nuggets?
I don’t mind boneless chicken nuggets once in a while. But one of my bigger weaknesses is Chinese and Japanese food. I regularly visit a restaurant called Sarku Japan. I order their teriyaki chicken with fried rice and steamed vegetables.
I love that stuff. I’ve gone often enough that the cashier already starts ringing up my order when I step up to the register.
The chicken is boneless. But there have been a handful of times where I’ve found what felt like either bone or hard cartilage. I didn’t swallow it, fortunately. Even though the pieces of chicken are smaller than even half a typical chicken nugget, I still chew them enough that I’ve managed to catch those very rare instances of bone.
I even felt a tiny chip of bone from a hamburger patty in a Sonic burger.
If missing such a tiny piece of bone caused me that kind of damage, I don’t know that I could laugh it off quite so easily.
At the same time, I am aware chickens — and cows, for that matter — do indeed have bones. So I understand that even when I should be able to expect boneless is boneless, I should reasonably be on guard…just in case.
I don’t think a restaurant would intentionally let something like that slip by. If investigators suspected such a thing, I don’t think an attempted murder charge would have been unreasonable.
But accidents will always happen. The world just isn’t that perfect of a place.
Would you assume boneless nuggets couldn’t possibly contain a bone? If so, you’d better chew carefully next time! You might be in for a life-threatening surprise!