There is a difference in degree which is also a difference in kind when you find a whole mouse head in your food, vs. a fractional piece of a bug.
What should the store have said? “Here’s a non-insulting settlement offer; PLEASE don’t sue us, and I mean pretty please.”
Since the company is guilty of a misdemeanor in Utah (see below) they should not have been so cavalier. She has an excellent case for negligence and they were very very stupid not to try a little harder to pacify her.
The Utah Code annotated in 1953, provides: 40-20-5, “Every person who manufacturers for sale, sells, exchanges or delivers, or offers to sell, exchange, or deliver, or has in his profession with intent to sell, exchange, or deliver, any adulterated or misbranded drug, or article of food, drink or confectionary, or who adulterates or misbrands any article of food, drink, or drug or confectionary, is guilty of a misdemeanor.” 4-20-8, “For the purpose of this chapter and article and redeem to be adulterated:…in the case of foods…(5) if it contains any added poisons or other deleterious ingredients which may render such article injurious to health…(7) if it consists in whole or part of a filthy, decomposed or putrid animal or vegetable substance or any portion of any animal unfit for food (whether manufactured or not), or if it is a product of a diseased animal or one that has died otherwise than from slaughter.”
After reviewing your cite, I don’t have a leg to stand on. Previous cases support litigation. I can also agree that legal action forces a manufacturer to tighten the inspection process, and we will all benefit from that. For some people, a mouse head in a can of beans is a winning lottery ticket.
For those who aren’t busy kidding themselves that that processed food is pristine, we shrug. Again, food here is plentiful, cheap, and convenient. Perfection in processed food is not a reasonable expectation.
I will have to give her the benefit of the doubt because the mechanism of it happening is plausible but many of these high-profile contamination stories whether it is broken glass, razor blades, or lizards in a burger are fabrications to gain attention and get some easy money from the company. I am always skeptical.
I don’t think anybody thinks you can’t sue. You can always sue. The point people are trying to make is get the hell over it, it happens and will always happen. It’s not in the same league as glycol in the food.
Expressions of regret and intentions to review canning procedures – without accepting blame or admitting deficiencies – would have been an excellent response. And of course, as a response to media, “nothing” is always pretty good, from the litigation-defense position. IOW, something other than the equivalent of Eh, mousehead, schmousehead, what you gonna do? would have been called for, IMO.
And as others have already noted, there are significant differences of scale and type between finding small insect bits (never appetizing) and the head of a small mammal (horrifying).
Personally, if I can’t get fresh, I eat almost all frozen veggies because they taste better, look better, and stay fresher. Now to those reasons I can add “never heard of a mouse head in frozen veggies.” And anyone having stories of foreign bodies in frozen veggies – LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.
Here’s what was quoted in your article from the company:
It looks like they have the regret covered, particularly since they sent the first letter with the $100 attached with an apology.
But claiming an intention to review canning procedures is admitting a deficiency, especially in light of the statute that’s in place in their state. If Hello Again’s chart is correct, because Allen is an Arkansas company, their statute reads:
My guess is that the company wants to show that it did everything reasonably possible, so it also needs to show that this eventuality was unavoidable. The last sentence of the company’s statement was qualifying their procedures, not in mitigation of the entire event, which they already apologized for.
And silence was their first course of action when they sent the letter to the woman asking her not to disclose more information to the media with the check for $100. Once the woman took it to the media and made an accusation however, silence would have the potential to give the impression that they were liable.
According to your article, the company seems to be basing their information on the word of this woman.
According to this, the company has not been given evidence of her claim, so they can’t know how big the foreign object is or even whether it really exists. Beyond proving that the event actually happened, the woman also needs to prove damages. Since she didn’t eat it, she’d have to make another claim for damages. So without knowing the magnitude of the claim or the evidence of the event in hand, it wouldn’t be advantageous for the company to admit that the head of this particular animal was on a different scale than an insect. Without the evidence, any admission could create liability for the company which could result in a stockholder suit.
I’m a vegan and tend not to eat veggies and fruits from cans. I’m less inclined now.
There is a slight difference. If I find a cube of chicken breast in a can of vegetable soup, obviously it’s a foreign body, but it tends to suggest a different - I think lesser - kind of negligence at the factory than if I find a mouse head in there.
Isn’t a mouse head of different size and weight than a green bean? I’d think they could use some sort of sorting machinery that would at least limit the foreign objects to ones that resemble green beans in size, shape or weight.
They don’t weigh individual slices of beans and drop them in the can. The chopped beans are filled in mass and a weight for the can would check the fullness of the can.
It’s kind of funny to me how any discussion on this Board, no matter how MPSIMS, can devolve to a mincing of legalities. But, hey, I don’t mind a spot of mincing, so here we go:
“We are reviwing our procedures” is NOT an admission of liability or of “deficiency.” It means “We’ll look into it.” And the language you are quoting is not a statute, it’s from a case. There apparently is no statute addressing the issue in Arkanasas, at least according to Hello Again’s link, and I have not looked any further than that.
A mouse head in a can of anything is NOT unavoidable. It simply isn’t. That’s why “these things happen” is such a laughable and irresponsibly cavelier response. People purchasing canned goods have an expectation that those goods will be free from large dead mammal parts, and that is a reasonable expectation. Even if the company feels it must state for the record that it has done everything it can then it says “we’ve done everything we can” without adding “these things happen,” because they don’t appear to happen over at Dole or Del Monte – or maybe those conglomerates are smart enough to handle such incidences quiently.
No, it isn’t. “Things like this” clearly refers to the event under discussion (finding a mouse head), not to their procedures. “Things like this [our procedures] occur” doesn’t even make any sense.
From a legal standpoint, it is generally unreasonable to infer anything from silence. I fail to see how “inevitably, these things occur” works to reduce their liability any more than just not saying anything to the media would have. Now in addition to dealing with potential liability for the event – which still exists under a theory of negligence, and perhaps negligent infliction of emotional distress – they must deal with the impression they have made that they don’t really care that there are mouse parts in their products because, hey, these things happen. Moreover, such an attitude is hardly going to reassure other potential customers who might be concerned that their purchases from this company might be similarly adulterated.
Even if this is true, so what? The company apparently is not disputing the story (at least as far as we know). To the contrary, they speculate that the mouse probably found its way into the supply “during the harvest,” which is not consistent with disputing it.
Are we reading the same article? Please point out where the article says the company has not been given evidence of her claim. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t say either way. It does indicate, however, that the company has not thus far disputed the factual basis for the claim.
She doesn’t have to make “another” claim for damages; damages are part of her claim for negligence, in the event she sues the company. But yes, she must prove damages in order to prevail. So what?
I never said anything about admitting anything. But the realm of appropriate responses to “Hey, I just found a horrifying dead mammal body part in your food product” does not include “inevitably, these things happen.”
A stockholder suit? :dubious: What would be the basis for a stockholder suit over a simple negligence claim? We’re really in left field now. Do you even know if this company is one having shareholders? And as I’ve already said, the universe of appropriate responses to this event do not include only (a) an unqualified admission of liability or (b) :: shrug :: inevitably, these things happen. There are a plethora of responses more appropriate than (b) that do not amount to (a).
Speaking as a reasonably educated consumer, I find a mouse head to be far outside the boundaries of what I consider to be “acceptable” in my food. I’m willing to accept that, yes, there are bugs in food. There is no way to completely clean a crop of insects unless we want to consume mass quantities of insecticides.
But, can’t she sue 'em where she found 'em? The Manufacturer (Allens, Inc.) is a nationwide distributor of foodstuffs. Isn’t this Worldwide Volkswagon? (These jurisdiction questions make my teeth hurt, so its more than possible that I’m wrong).
Sure there is a difference- a *cultural * difference. In some countries, that mouse is food.
We eat rodents in the States, too: rabbit, groundhog, and squirrel. Is that disturbing? Nah. That is a matter of taste, upbringing- geography.
Is it more upsetting because it was the head of an animal? 'Cause it’s possible that the mouse was chopped to bits during processing. Someone else might have a can of beans with a chunk of mouse breast. Would they recognize it as mouse meat? Probably not. Would the surprise have been less disgusting if it were a chicken head? We eat chickens, right? Cube of chicken breast: okay. Chicken head: run screaming to the nearest media outlet.
I understand why someone would be grossed out and disappointed when they find a foreign object in a can of beans. I understand why a public stink was raised over the incident. I don’t understand the horror expressed in the OP-what is the disconnect between cow, chicken, pig, and mouse? It’s all meat.
And why do Americans take this surplus of cheap, accessible food for granted? Is it okay that some omnivores like to pretend that meat spontaneously appears in geometric chunks and slices? Is it reasonable to pretend that the detritus in a can of beans is tolerable because it is in tiny, unrecognizable pieces? Oh, is that a whole corn worm floating in your soup? Let me chop it up into tiny pieces and stir it in for you. Better?
Everyone needs to know where the food comes from. And be grateful that your food is plentiful, to excess. We are healthy, we are well-fed, we are lucky.
I used to work in customer service for one of the worlds largest snack food companies. As part of my training I got to tour a plant where they produced some of the products.
I can honestly tell you that with the size of these operations and the amount of product they produce we as consumers are lucky that we find so little foreign matter in our food that when it happens it is worthy of media coverage.
I was in the plant for maybe an hour, hour and a half tops, and during that time they produced enough product to fill tens of thousands of bags of chips. They have plants all over the USA and Canada. They make millions of bags of chips every day. I am sure the green bean company cans hundreds of thousands of cans of green beans to be sold all over the nation every day. If customers want to continue to have great products at low prices everything can keep moving along just the way it is, or they can add an extra layer of employees and machines to catch the few pieces of foreign matter that escape the prevention systems they already have in place and we can pay $10 for a bag of chips or $3 for a can of green beans.
They seem to have reached a happy middle ground between cost and quality and I have to say that I am pretty happy with the large majority of food products I buy.
They are right when they say these things happen though. After all, into every life some mouse heads must fall.
