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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

I think this is extremely weird. If someone is allergic to nuts, and they’re being served ‘nut free’ food that has some traces of nuts in, and that sends them to the emergency room people would lose their minds.

If I were served boneless wings, and I found a 5cm bone in there it’d be far outside the bounds of expectation.

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This is a lot more akin to finding a piece of a cherry/olive pit in a jar of pitted fruit. A reasonable attempt was made with natural products in play.

I agree. This type of article is internet forum argument fuel because the area is such grey, arguments on both size. Reminds me of the lady who got burned by McDonalds coffee like, bro, you spill hot coffee on you then you might get a burnt. She won that one. McDonalds keeps it hot for sterilization/safety. I'm guessing also there is diminishing returns to bone removal so removing 99.9% is much easier to do than removing 99.999999 percent. So it's like, do you do something that harms 1 in a million but makes it way cheaper or way safer for the rest, or avoid that harm but now people pay the price. My main thing here, equivalent to "bro why'd you spill coffee on yourself" is "bro, do you chew your food, because someone who chews their food would know there's a bone in it"

> Reminds me of the lady who got burned by McDonalds coffee like, bro, you spill hot coffee on you then you might get a burnt. She won that one. McDonalds keeps it hot for sterilization/safety.

That's a pretty misleading description; they lost that case because they knowingly kept their coffee far above a safe temperature to serve, there had been a string of previous cases proving that it was obviously unsafe, and their negligence landed a woman in the ER (followed by being in the hospital for over a week, followed by permanent disfigurement and being partially disabled for two years).

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... )

I think it is amazing you can get third degree burns from a bunch of 80-90 degree coffee dropped in your lap though. I would not have expected that.

IIRC it was more like 120-130 degrees. McDonalds chose a higher temperature under the assumption it would cool a bit on the trip home, and be a normal temperature by the time you drank it.

Edit - it's in the Wikipedia link:

> Liebeck's attorneys argued that, at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C), McDonald's coffee was defective, and more likely to cause serious injury than coffee served at any other establishment.

In case it's not at the top of anyone's mind, water boils at 212 F / 100 C.

80-90 Fahrenheit is barely warm. It was 80-90C, which is just a hair under boiling and will absolutely do serious damage.

That's not serving temperature - that's brewing temperature. You have to work to keep coffee that hot, it's not something that happens passively.

> Reminds me of the lady who got burned by McDonalds coffee

It's really amazing to me how long that bit of corporate propaganda has managed to survive. Especially in the internet age. I know the narrative demonizing that poor woman was pushed very aggressively, but 30 years is a long time. Not many campaigns can hope to be so successful while being so wrong. I get the feeling that even 30 years from now people will still be repeating the same lies.

My concern is not with food that has bones in, it is with labelling such food as boneless.

If you cannot guarantee your food doesn’t have 2 inch bones in, you should be unable to label it boneless.

Only if this jar of pitted fruit was called an ‘oliveless jar of cherries’. Most people would be highly surprised to find olives in something that goes out of it’s way to indicate it doesn’t contain any.

I could have been more clear but you misread. Olives are fruit, too.

An unpitted olive in a jar of pitted olives.

An unpitted cherry in a jar of pitted cherries.

I'd never heard of boneless wings before this, but having had my share of wings I don't think I'd expect them to be 100% bone-free—I'd expect them to be devoid of the large bones that make up half of regular wings and make them difficult to eat. An occasional smaller bone is a different story and not something I'd ever be confident of avoiding in any piece of meat or fish.

I guess I see it similarly to seedless watermelon. The large annoying seeds are (mostly) gone, but there are plenty of small white ones.

Boneless wings are a euphemism for a heavily battered, more expensive chicken nugget, which won't typically have any bones because of the way they are processed.

Boneless wings are processed differently than chicken nuggets.

From the ruling:

> The record reflects that the boneless chicken wing consumed by Berkheimer was prepared from a boneless, skinless, chicken breast, which was manufactured by Wayne Farms and subsequently sold to REKM by GFS. It is undisputed that REKM prepared the chicken dish by cutting one of the chicken breasts into approximately one-inch sized cubes that were later fried. The chicken meat was not ground or further manipulated prior to serving; rather, the final product was "essentially[,] a breaded and fried piece of chicken breast."

Sounds like these aren't that kind of boneless wing.

Chicken nuggets are typically ground or minced chicken formed into a nugget shape before being battered and fried. “Boneless” wings and the like are usually whole pieces of breast meat, in my experience.

They’re more expensive, and rightfully so, than a chicken nugget because they’re whole pieces, not reclaimed scraps from processing chickens.

I _have_ eaten boneless wings many times and I would be extremely surprised if a "boneless" wing had any bones in it, at all.

The difference between that and a seedless watermelon is that watermelon seeds don't send a man to the emergency room.

A 2" bone won't either, if you chew your food properly like an adult?

Could cut the your tongue or the inside of your mouth, though. Chicken bones are very prone to be broken into sharp pieces.

Boneless wings are typically battered deboned chicken breast; in this incident, they were.

Yep, I found that in the ruling. And a 1.5 inch bone in a deboned chicken breast is rare, but not unheard of.

The weirdest thing about this incident isn't that the bone was in the boneless chicken breast, it's that the bone managed to make it through the kitchen's cubing process and the diner's cutting the chunk of chicken into 3 bites.

So, boneless chicken wings are neither wings nor boneless?

Why are manufacturers givn so much latitude?

It's way easier to eliminate nuts being in or near the production line of a food product than it is to remove every single bone from something that inherently has bones, but even then:

> The Nut Free labeling means the product does not contain nuts. However, it doesn't guarantee the snack was made inside a dedicated nut free facility. Whether or not the nut free product was created on the same production line as a non nut free snack, is unknown.

https://www.nutfree.org/different-kinds-of-nut-free-labeling...

the label doesn't mean the process it was made was completely immune from contamination.

In the UK we've labelled things made in factories that also handle nuts since forever. I assume it's an EU thing that we never got rid of.

Food products in the US have the same labelling.

So don't label them as "boneless" then? :)

It is only "far outside the bounds of expectation" if you have no world model of how your food is actually produced.

It's outside bounds of expectation if you know how language works. People expect products labelled "boneless" to have no bones. Words mean things.

Well, I'd also expects "boneless wings" to be wings, but apparently that is not true, either.

Product naming has become an area where "meaning" is no longer a thing. It's the sad reality where advertisement has replaced communication.

I have no clue what ‘boneless wings’ are, having never seen or heard of them before. But I’m entirely confident about what ‘boneless’ means.

Boneless (adjective): without a bone

Apparently a lot of people feel that if I were to go into a store in the US and order a boneless chicken, I should expect it to have bones in. That doesn’t compute for me.

http://www.quickmeme.com/img/e4/e417a00a1d7c6f84ec4b88cad9d2...

Two totally different scenarios.

Who's allergic to bones? Not just chokes on them, but truly has an allergy?

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