Legal News

In San Francisco Chicken Suits, Plaintiffs Calling Fowl

By Ashby Jones

Call this post a chicken wrap.

The LA Times recently ran a piece in which it highlighted two chicken-related controversies, one involving the purported dangers of chicken, both real and fake.

Let us explain. In the first suit, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has sued on behalf of an Arizona woman accusing Quorn Foods Inc. of not disclosing on labels the fact that some people have serious allergic reactions to the main ingredient in Quorn.

What’s Quorn? Glad you asked. We’d never heard of it and were, frankly, gripped by the description. Check out these paragraphs from the LAT article:

Quorn is derived from a protein rich fungus, which the company grows in large vats. The fungus, Fusarium venenatum, was discovered growing in a field in Buckinghamshire, England, in the late 1960s and developed as a food product.

“In the 1960s, people were concerned that we would run out of protein and started a search for new protein sources that could feed the world and discovered this fungus that grows naturally in soil. It makes a delicious and nutritious meat alternative. It has as much protein as eggs and as much fiber as broccoli on an ounce per ounce basis,” said David Wilson, managing director of Quorn, which is a division Marlow Foods, a British company.

He told the LAT the lawsuit was frivolous and unwarranted.

But the plaintiff disagrees, alleging that that more than 1,000 people have reported suffering from nausea, vomiting and diarrhea after eating Quorn’s products. According to the lawsuit, Kathy Cardinale, a 43-year-old advertising executive, ate Quorn's Chik'n Patties on three separate occasions in 2008 and became “became violently ill” each time.

At the same time, chicken — the real thing — is coming under fire as well. Late last week, a doctors group filed suit against KFC for selling grilled chicken with dangerous levels of a cancer-causing chemical.

In the suit, also filed in San Francisco Superior Court, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine accused KFC of violating California’s Proposition 65, which requires businesses to warn customers if they are being exposed to substances that cause cancer or birth defects. Click here for the story, from the SF Chron.

The chemical cited in the lawsuit, known as PhIP, is a byproduct of the grilling process and was added to the state’s list of carcinogens in 1994. The doctors group said an independent laboratory found the substance in every one of 12 grilled chicken samples bought from six Bay Area KFC restaurants in May.

Company spokesman Rick Maynard said KFC’s “Kentucky Grilled Chicken” product “meets or exceeds all federal and state regulations for food safety.” The doctors organization, he added, “promotes a vegetarian agenda.”

The group’s scientific and policy adviser, Kristie Sullivan, agreed that it promotes a vegetarian diet but said the recent tests of KFC chicken confirmed that it contains a hazardous chemical.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 28, 2009 (boomark / email).