Boneless Wings Can Now Contain Bones, At Least According To Ohio

You may want to watch out the next time you order a plate of boneless Buffalo wings because, according to the Ohio Supreme Court, that whole "doesn't contain bones" thing is more of a suggestion than a guarantee. As a customer, you might reasonably expect that when you order anything with "boneless" in the name, what you ordered would be boneless. That is, in fact, what an Ohio man named Michael Berkheimer expected when he ordered some boneless wings from the local restaurant Wings on Brookwood, according to CBS News.

However, after suffering health issues for days, a doctor later found a 5-centimeter piece of chicken bone in his esophagus. Berkheimer sued under the seemingly reasonable assumption that the food you are served should actually reflect what the menu says it is. But four Ohio judges disagreed.

According to the 4-3 ruling, Berkheimer should have been prepared for his boneless food to have bones, because chicken naturally has bones. What's most baffling are the analogies used by the court to justify letting the restaurant off the hook. The justice writing for the majority said that the label should not be taken literally any more than someone ordering chicken fingers would expect literal fingers. The problem, of course, being that boneless pieces of chicken, say the rare, obscure cut known as chicken breasts, are very much a real thing that exist and you can eat, while chicken hands are not a real thing at all.

The ruling would already be a fascinatingly weird interpretation of what food names mean, but it's actually made egregious by how serious the injuries that led to the lawsuit were. Berkheimer not only ran a fever for days but also developed a bacterial infection that led to lasting medical problems, including difficulty breathing.

It might be okay to be fast and loose with the definition of wing, because nobody is going to get sick eating some tiny boneless chicken tenders instead of a literal wing, but you actually will be hurt by trying to swallow a chicken bone. And as an absurd little kicker, the ruling also referred to boneless as "a cooking style, not a guarantee" which, counterpoint: no it isn't, and yes it is.

The nonsense thinking behind this becomes clear when you imagine the chaos that would come if such an unreasonably vague notion of food labeling ends up getting applied more broadly. Don't expect a femur in your hamburger? Sorry, cows have bones. Can we now label any juice with sugar as "sugar free" just because juice naturally has sugar? Could you practically lie to someone and poison them because they should reasonably understand that words have no meaning? That's almost admirably nihilistic, but this is a court of law. We can only hope this ruling gets overturned by more level heads, but until then, maybe don't eat boneless wings, or boneless anything, in Ohio.