Lawmakers are Trying to Overturn That Court Ruling That Made it Legal to Have Bones in Boneless Wings. But They're Missing the Point by a Mile.

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I think we all do our best to avoid petty, partisan politics around here. You get enough of that wherever you go and we take great care to make this a place where all are welcome, as long as they're willing to respect other people's opinions. 

But it's inevitable that sometimes, some hot button issues come up that need to be addressed. Topics that everyone is passionate about. Important enough that hills will be died upon. Of course I could only be talking about Boneless Chicken Wings.

 I've stayed away from the subject of Chicken Wings altogether around here since the height of the insane Covid overreaction, when I felt compelled to speak out against the draconian, unConstitutional restrictions put in place by our overlords:

Substantive, my ass. No one elected these kleptocrats to tell us what our definition of "stantive" foods should be. Samuel Adams wouldn't have put up with it and neither will I. But I digress.

Then last summer Ohio's Tate weighed in on a court ruling in his native homeland on the more narrow issue of Boneless Wings:

Which he considered to be absurd. And now an Ohio legislator has introduced a bill hoping to right that wrong:

Source - Columbus state senator William Demora introduced Senate Bill 38, which would mandate that juries, not judges, determine the liability of restaurants and food providers by deciding whether the injured individual had “reasonable expectation that the food did not contain a substance that is injurious to human health.” 

Last summer, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit from a man who was seeking compensation after sustaining a throat injury when his boneless wings contained a piece of bone. The Supreme Court ruled in a 4-3 decision that stated individuals can “reasonably assume” that pieces of bone are a possibility in boneless wings.

Alrighty then. It seems like common sense on the surface. How can you sell a thing as without bones when it's not necessarily without bones? 

But with all due respect to my co-worker and this lawmaker, they're arguing the wrong side of the equation. The issue should not be with the word "Boneless." It should be with the word "Wings," which Boneless Wings most definitely are not. There's your false advertising. There's the thing that does harm to the consumer. I'll let this great American patriot explain:

Find the lie in his argument. You can't. "We would be disgusted if a butcher was mislabeling cuts of meat. But then we go around pretending the breast of a chicken is its wing? … We can call them Buffalo Style Chicken Tenders." The logic is flawless. The sentiment is accurate. The argument cannot be refuted. 

More to the point, when you put something from a vertebrate into your digestive system, there is risk of bones involved. Always. In every case. It's the same when you eat something with an exoskeleton or outer shell. This has also be confirmed by higher courts who have found that if you get a piece of clam shell in your clam chowder, that's within the law. You knew what you were getting into when you ordered food made from a bivalve. Now if you got a piece of clam shell in your waffle, you have a legitimate gripe. By the same token, if you get a chicken wing bone in your ice cream, you're the Mayor of Lawsuit City. 

We can all be sorry for the poor unfortunate soul who wagered his health on the word "Boneless" appearing on the menu. But that was never a guarantee of bonelessness. And while referring to them by their proper name of Chicken Tenders won't make them any safer, it may protect customers from false hope.