No Bones About It

 This is close to my son's heart: Buffalo Wild Wings is being sued for selling "boneless chicken wings." If your database is anything like mine, your brain just switched to a Gary Larson cartoon of a Boneless Chicken Ranch. Dozens of limp fowl laying on the ground, hanging over the fence, dangling from the sign. 

Not a pretty sight. 

But funny. 

And this is the feeling I got when I read about Aimen Halim, who purchased an order of the aforementioned "boneless wings" back in January, assuming that the "food" he had purchased would be the meat of a deboned chicken wing. At first blush, this seems like a reasonable argument, since this seems reasonable. Until you take into account where Mister Halim was standing when he chose this menu item. He was standing in a fast food establishment. He was getting these "wings" for just under a dollar apiece. The time and energy required to carefully remove the bones from a chicken wing, batter them up and fry them is astronomical compared to dumping a bag of pre-formed, breaded, processed "chicken" into a fryer and taking the time to let them cool only slightly before tossing them onto a piece of parchment paper. 

It's fast food.

Aimen might also be surprised by the fact that Arby's may or may not have the meat, but the actual "roast beef" they are serving on their sandwiches bears little to no connection to the meal your mom used to make. Depending on your mom. I have plenty of anecdotes regarding the "beef" that is cooked and served under that moniker, but I can't say that it is worth litigation. It's Arby's, for god's sake. 

Here's another anecdote, as long as we're in the neighborhood. In high school, friends would buy an order of chicken wings at an establishment called The Red Barn just to watch me eat them. Bones and all. I had made the logical leap that any "bones" left inside those deep-fried pieces of chicken had long since degraded to something easily digested, given the proper amount of chewing. 

Of course, it never occurred to me that suing The Red Barn for what would become decades of stunt eating, but then again, Mister Halim probably unaware of the case chemical engineer Ander Christensen brought before the Lincoln, Nebraska city council. His approach was a little different: “Our children are raised being afraid of bones attached to their meat. That’s where meat comes from: it grows on bones." Now if someone can just show me the anatomical chart that shows where the "nugget" is grown on a chicken.