Mcdonald's found liable after girl suffers second-degree burns from hot Chicken | Hacker News Reader

Mcdonald's found liable after girl suffers second-degree burns from hot Chicken

nbcnews.com

8 pointsflykespice12 comments

"Kids meal served into a vehicle at temperatures capable of second-degree burns" seems a bit beyond the pale.

I mean it’s fairly consistent - the hot coffee incident was McDonald’s repeatedly causing 3rd degree burns due to serving over safe temperature coffee. They then bought a whole lot of coverage and a whole bunch of politicians to make it sound like the victim was the one in the wrong. I assume we’ll see that play out again this time as well.

Any hot food has the potential to cause burns and the specifics matter a lot.

In this particular case there isn't even an agreement what the temperature was: "the family’s lawyers argued the temperature was above 200 degrees (93°C), while the defense said it was no more than 160 degrees (71°C)". That's a big difference.

I couldn't find any regulation on minimum serving temperature in the US, but in the Netherlands it's 60°C/140°F – note this is the minimum; in practice it's reasonable to expect that most meats are served between 60 and 70°C (140-160°F).

So, if McDonalds is right and "it was no more than 160 degrees" then they probably didn't do much wrong, but if the family is right and "the temperature was above 200 degrees" they probably did.

It's also not clear to me what exactly happened in the first place; how did the burns occur? The statement "nuggets were not meant to be pressed between a seat belt and human flesh for more than two minutes" seems to imply they were tucked between the seatbelt? That seems like to have a high potential to cause burns even at reasonable temperature levels. But another article talks about "a piece of chicken fell on her daughter’s leg", which is a very different thing.

With no clear picture of what happened it's very hard to say anything meaningful. This make the case quite a bit different from the coffee one, where everyone agreed on the basic facts of the case but disagreed on whether the temperature was reasonable or not.

Served or cooked? The FDA requires certain temperatures for certain seconds but I don’t know if any rule that requires the food be still that hot when it arrives to the customer.

It's served. Looking again, it's actually part of HACPP.[1] I don't know the exact legal status of that in the US, but [2] is pretty close: "Bacteria grow most rapidly in the range of temperatures between 40 °F and 140 °F [..] Keep hot food hot—at or above 140 °F".

Regardless of whether or not it's legally regulated in the US, you should be keeping meat above 60°C, and a 10°C upwards margin seems reasonable.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_analysis_and_critical_c...

[2]: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...

If it can be shown that those temperatures can cause significant burns to children, I wouldn't be surprised to see modifications to the guidelines (and those are pretty "wide" already - covering the heat lamps and "2 hours" and similar).

I'd be wary of changing things too quickly based on an incident. How often do these sort of incidents happen? And how severe are they? This is another difference with the coffee case: there burns there were very severe and required extensive hospital treatment, but here it's not really clear what the damage was here – it just mentions second degree burns on the upper leg, which can range from "ouch" for a few weeks to "requires skin grafts". Since there is no mention of hospitalisation, I'd wager it's "ouch".

There are many things that can be hazardous to children because children are stupid. We should probably focus on "does" rather than "can" here. It's not my impression that McDonalds currently does cause a great number of serious burn victims among children with their chicken nuggets. Sporadic small incidents are of course unfortunate, but you can't avoid all risk everywhere, and there is a trade-off as well as lower temperatures at serving would increase the chance of food poisoning.

The parents argue that the nugget was served far too hot; McDonalds denied it. I have no way to verify if that's true, but the more I think about this case the more I suspect seems there is very little going on. "I stubbed my toe and sued for $$$" rather than "someone was seriously injured", based on what's reported in the media about this as well as the jury's verdict which merely found McDonalds failed to provide instructions for safe handling of the food and did not find the product to be defective (i.e. too hot).

shade of 'McDonald's hot Coffee';

Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, also known as the McDonald's coffee case and the hot coffee lawsuit : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

Please move to the parking bay and wait 10-minutes till the food from the fryer cools in the Bay Marie

> Thursday’s decision was split, with jurors finding the franchise holder liable for negligence and failure to warn customers about the risk of hot food

If I were on the jury, I'd probably have pushed for not guilty on the failure to include a warning.

Writing "Warning: Our chicken nuggets are served at a dangerously hot temperature in willful ongoing violation of safety laws, and should not be handled or consumed by humans at serving temperature" really shouldn't be necessary, or have the ability to absolve them of future liability for negligence.

Now I won’t be able to have warm nuggets by the time I get home. The crybabyification of America

Exactly! People are such babies they can't make their own at home.

Less snarkily, I think it's reasonable to expect "fast food" to be safe to consume on receipt.

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