Consumers cannot expect boneless chicken wings to actually be free of bones, a divided Ohio Supreme Court ruled Thursday, rejecting claims by a restaurant patron who suffered serious medical complications from getting a bone stuck in his throat.
Michael Berkheimer was dining with his wife and friends at a wing joint in Hamilton, Ohio, and had ordered the usual — boneless wings with parmesan garlic sauce — when he felt a bite-size piece of meat go down the wrong way. Three days later, feverish and unable to keep food down, Berkeimer went to the emergency room, where a doctor discovered a long, thin bone that had torn his esophagus and caused an infection.
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In a 4-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said Thursday that “boneless wings” refers to a cooking style, and that Berkheimer should’ve been on guard against bones since it’s common knowledge that chickens have bones. The high court sided with lower courts that had dismissed Berkheimer’s suit.
On one hand, I accept that a boneless chicken wing has a tiny chance of containing some amount of bone, and can see where suing a restaurant over it, even if you injure yourself eating it, is a bit frivolous. Boneless chicken wings did come from a chicken with bones in it, and it’s weird to complain that the chicken wasn’t made into completely homogeneous pink slime before being turned into a nugget…
I don’t understand, however, how this made it to the state Supreme Court, resulting in this decision, which seemingly allows restaurants to outright lie about what they are serving.
Sure but then someone prepared the chicken and decided that the outcome can be described as boneless. Personally, I would also expect the bones to have been removed.
You can debone chicken without turning it into pink slime.
I’d rather expect it to be made from another part of the chicken in the style of wings.
It would be trivial and inexpensive to use an x-ray to check for bones and fragments.
I’m going to need a lot more details before this stops sounding like the craziest idea I’ve heard all month.
X-ray machines are extremely common in industrial inspection processes. https://www.cassel-inspection.com/x-ray-inspection-machine
X-ray would be ideal to spot bone because there’s huge contrast. That’s why you get an x-ray for bones, opposed to an MRI which would be used for soft tissues.
Sure, verifying chicken is deboned before it leaves the factory makes more sense than installing x-ray machines at every pizzeria.
I never proposed doing it at every pizzeria. Production facilities where they make boneless wings in bulk. A human might not even be involved.
But yeah, if the human leaves a bone in the chicken, they’re doing their job wrong…