Michael Berkheimer sat down to a plate of parmesan garlic boneless wings and ended up in surgery. A five-centimetre chicken bone lodged in his oesophagus, turning a casual restaurant meal into a medical emergency that would eventually reach Ohio’s highest court. What happened next says less about one man’s bad luck and more about how American diners have been sold a fiction so successfully that even judges now treat it as common knowledge.
What Actually Happened
Berkheimer’s 2016 injury at Wings on Brookwood in Hamilton, Ohio, was severe enough to require intervention to remove the bone from his throat. He sued the restaurant and its suppliers for negligence, arguing that a product explicitly marketed as “boneless” carried an implied promise of actual bonelessness. The case worked its way up to the Ohio Supreme Court, where a narrow 4-3 majority sided with the food industry.
The majority’s reasoning hinged on a distinction between menu style and absolute guarantee. Chickens contain bones, and diners know chickens contain bones. Therefore, the court reasoned, “boneless wings” describes a preparation method and presentation style rather than a legally binding assurance that every piece has been mechanically or manually cleared of all bone fragments. The occasional small bone, in this view, represents an inherent risk of eating chicken products rather than a failure of due care by the restaurant or its suppliers.
The three dissenting justices pushed back with a question that cuts closer to how actual families operate: when a parent orders boneless wings, tenders, or nuggets for their child, do they genuinely expect to find bones inside? The dissent highlighted the practical reality that consumers treat these labels as safety signals, not culinary poetry. For parents managing meals for young children, the word “boneless” functions as a screening tool to identify lower-risk options in a busy restaurant environment.
The Aftermath
Berkheimer’s case now stands as precedent in Ohio, and its logic will likely influence how other jurisdictions handle similar claims. The 4-3 split signals that this was no straightforward application of settled law but rather a contested choice between competing frameworks for understanding food labels.
The majority’s decision aligns with a broader legal tradition that distinguishes between “natural” components of food and truly foreign contaminants. A bone in chicken occupies a different category than glass in a salad or metal in a pie. Courts have historically been more reluctant to find negligence when the offending object is something that naturally occurs in the source animal, even if its presence in the final product was unintended.
For Berkheimer personally, the ruling means his negligence claims failed. For the restaurant industry, it reinforces a marketing strategy that has been extraordinarily effective because it exploits a gap between what words mean literally and what they signal commercially.
How “Boneless Wings” Became a Thing
The product sitting on Berkheimer’s plate was never a wing in any anatomical sense. True deboned wings require laborious manual removal of bones from actual wing sections, drumettes and flats, while preserving the original muscle structure. Most American restaurants sell “boneless wings” as pieces of chicken breast meat, often trimmings, that get breaded, fried, and sauced to evoke the wing experience without involving actual wings.
This substitution was never hidden so much as never explained. The label succeeded because it attached itself to two powerful consumer desires simultaneously: the cultural cachet of chicken wings as a social, flavor-forward food, and the practical convenience of boneless eating. Wings carry associations of sports bars, shared plates, bold sauces. Breast meat carries associations of easier chewing, faster consumption, and safer feeding of children.
The economics heavily favor the breast-meat approach. Deboning actual wings is time-consuming and yields less usable product per bird. Breast meat is abundant, relatively cheap, and mechanically straightforward to process into consistent pieces. Restaurants could offer a “wing-like” product at lower cost and higher margin while consumers perceived themselves as getting a premium convenience item.
Three Definitions of the Same Word
The Berkheimer case exposes a three-way collision in how “boneless” gets interpreted. For consumers, particularly parents, the word reads as a promise of complete bone absence, a safety designation that justifies selecting this menu item over others. The expectation is functional and literal: no bones means no bones.
For manufacturers and restaurants, “boneless” operates as a production category indicating the starting material, deboned muscle meat rather than whole anatomical parts. Industrial processing aims for bone removal but operates within tolerances. Small fragments slip through. The category acknowledges practical limits rather than guaranteeing perfect outcomes.
For the legal system, at least in Ohio, “boneless” now describes a menu style, a way of presenting and consuming food that references wing culture without promising wing anatomy or absolute bonelessness. The judicial interpretation incorporates general knowledge about chickens into consumer expectations, effectively holding that diners should anticipate some residual risk even in products labeled to suggest its absence.
This disconnect is not unique to chicken products. Food marketing routinely deploys terms that sound like guarantees while functioning as descriptions of style or predominant characteristic. “White meat” nuggets can contain dark meat. “Real fruit” snacks can be mostly sugar and pectin. The gap between promise and product is where American food labeling lives, and courts have generally been reluctant to close it through negligence law.
What Diners Actually Get
The practical implication of the Ohio ruling is that consumers bear more responsibility for bone detection than the label might suggest. A “boneless wing” now carries a judicially recognized caveat: chickens have bones, processing is imperfect, and your vigilance remains your own best protection.
For parents specifically, the dissent’s warning carries weight. Products marketed to children, tenders and nuggets included, rely on the same “boneless” framing that the majority treated as merely stylistic. The court’s reasoning does not distinguish between adult consumers at sports bars and three-year-olds at family restaurants. The “general knowledge” that chickens contain bones assumes a level of consumer sophistication that may not match how these products are actually purchased and consumed.
The food industry, meanwhile, retains a label that has proven its commercial power. “Boneless wings” will continue to describe breast meat pieces dressed in wing sauce, and consumers will continue to order them expecting exactly what the word appears to promise. The Ohio Supreme Court has simply ruled that when the promise breaks, the law will not.
