Finding a bone in a pile of boneless wings is a little like finding a worm in an apple. But in the rare, unfortunate case that it does occur, don’t expect to win a lawsuit over the debacle. On Thursday, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in a 4-3 vote that a man was not entitled to compensation after he sued a restaurant, its food supplier, and a chicken farm after suffering injuries from swallowing a chicken bone lurking within one of his boneless wings.
During a 2016 meal at Wings on Brookwood in Hamilton, Ohio. Michael Berkheimer sat down with his wife and a few friends, and ordered his go-to: boneless wings with parmesan garlic sauce. According to the Ohio Supreme Court report, Berkheimer claimed that he cut each of his wings into two to three pieces before eating them, and on his second wing he felt “a piece of meat went down the wrong pipe.” He rushed to the restroom to try and cough it up, but was unsuccessful.
Over the next few days, Berkheimer developed a fever and began having trouble swallowing. He then went to the emergency room, where doctors discovered a thin “5 cm-long chicken bone” lodged in his esophagus. According to the report, Berkheimer claimed that the bone “tore his esophagus, causing a bacterial infection in his thoracic cavity and resulting in ongoing medical issues.”
Berkheimer filed a lawsuit, which eventually sparked a courtroom debate over what exactly constitutes a boneless wing: a piece of chicken meat that is indeed without bones, or a cooking style of preparing chicken. During the trial, a cook at Wings on Brookwood explained that the boneless wings in question are made with boneless, skinless chicken breasts made of white meat, unlike standard bone-in chicken wings. This prompted the court to refer to a case from California that hinged upon the foreign-natural test.
Even after the court determined that chicken bones are natural to chicken breasts, Berkheimer fought the court on this matter, claiming that the situation came down to whether or not he could have reasonably anticipated finding a bone in a food item labeled as “boneless.” The full 19-page report from the Ohio Supreme Court even goes so far as to break down multiple dictionary definitions of the word. In the end, it didn’t matter: the court concluded that the defendants were “not negligent in serving or supplying the boneless wing.”
The report goes on to say that “a diner reading ‘boneless wings’ on a menu would no more believe that the restaurant was warranting the absence of bones in the items than believe that the items were made from chicken wings, just as a person eating ‘chicken fingers’ would know that he had not been served fingers.”
According to the Associated Press, The National Chicken Council credits chain restaurant Buffalo Wild Wings with inventing boneless wings in 2003, so perhaps — unlike chicken fingers — the food is too young of a creation for the common consumer to have a solid grasp on what the term truly constitutes. But if we’re going by pure linguistics here, “boneless” does mean “without bones.”