Prune Pit Disclaimer?
jeff_wisnia
I enjoy eating pitted dried prunes in my breakfast dry cereal a couple
of times each week.
Enough times to remember each year while munching on my breakfast cereal
I'm startled to bite down on an "unpitted" prune and have to spit out
the pit.
I've never cracked a tooth on one of those pits but I'd expect it's not
unlikely some folks have.
Realizing that nothing can ever be perfect, I can't expect that the
preparers of dried pitted prunes can locate and remove every pit, as my
experience shows.
I looked today a three different brands of dried prunes at the
supermarket all labeled "Dried Pitted Prunes" and none of the packages
contained disclaimer warnings like, "Caution, this product may contain
occasional prune pits."
I'm wondering why no disclaimers? It would seem to me like a good way of
reducing the preparer's liability for purchaser's busted teeth.
The same goes for pitted olives I suppose, I've occasionally found a pit
in one of them.
Jeff
--
Jeffry Wisnia
(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)
The speed of light is 1.8*10e12 furlongs per fortnight.
Gordon Burditt
> supermarket all labeled "Dried Pitted Prunes" and none of the packages
> contained disclaimer warnings like, "Caution, this product may contain
> occasional prune pits."
I am not a lawyer.
I sometimes wonder why there is not a book of *all* disclaimers
included with every product. That is "Caution: do not sleep in
coffin with lid closed" would come with your package of prunes, and
"This product may contain occasional prune pits" would come with
your cell phone contract and the instruction manual for coffins.
Naturally, both would contain the non-trivial warning "dropping
disclaimer list may injure your foot, cause structural damage to
your house, or kill your cat", and "Do not read disclaimer list
while driving".
There is a danger that if you try to disclaim *everything*, it can
be taken as an exhaustive list, and anything you leave off can be
considered safe. For example, you might not think of disclaiming
that dropping the disclaimer list might cause an avalanche, but
when it does, your leaving it off may be considered a claim that
it's safe.
Mike Jacobs
wrote:
> I enjoy eating pitted dried prunes in my breakfast dry cereal a couple
> of times each week.
>
> Enough times to remember each year while munching on my breakfast cereal
> I'm startled to bite down on an "unpitted" prune and have to spit out
> the pit.
>
> I've never cracked a tooth on one of those pits but I'd expect it's not
> unlikely some folks have.
>
> Realizing that nothing can ever be perfect, I can't expect that the
> preparers of dried pitted prunes can locate and remove every pit, as my
> experience shows.
>
> I looked today a three different brands of dried prunes at the
> supermarket all labeled "Dried Pitted Prunes" and none of the packages
> contained disclaimer warnings like, "Caution, this product may contain
> occasional prune pits."
Maybe it's just your chosen brand, but I have frequently seen just
such disclaimers on a variety of packaged, machine-pitted fruits,
including dates, olives, cherries, prunes, etc.
Often the disclaimer is subtle, such as being part of the name of the
product (with the first part, what I put in lowercase in the example
below, being in _very_small_ print), such as this example I have seen:
"caution - machine-PITTED DATES"
> I'm wondering why no disclaimers? It would seem to me like a good way of
> reducing the preparer's liability for purchaser's busted teeth.
Some sort of caution/warning is a good idea, since it _is_ impossible
to be 100% certain that no hard parts got thru the automated machine-
pitting process; however, potential defendant processors and packagers
of these naturally-occurring food products might also anticipate that
the "consumer expectation" test, which is applied in many states to
determine whether a product is "defective" for strict-liability
purposes, would not be met even if such warnings were absent.
That is, even without a warning, the hypothetical "reasonable
consumer" should _expect_ that packaged, pre-pitted fruit products may
contain some pits that the processor may have missed, which pits are
not a "foreign substance" but rather are a naturally occurring part of
the original fruit, and thus the end user needs to be careful before
crunching down hard on what he assumes is a soft piece of dried
fruit. Common sense _does_ still play a part.
> The speed of light is 1.8*10e12 furlongs per fortnight.
How fast is that, in rope-knots per sandglass, when the captain orders
the officer of the deck to heave the log?
--
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Mike Jacobs
LAW OFFICE OF W. MICHAEL JACOBS
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(tel) 410-740-5685 (fax) 410-740-4300
Daniel R.Reitman
<jwisniaDu...@conversent.net> wrote:
[OP is surprised that manufacturers of dried pitted prunes do not
print disclaimers of occasional pits on the packacking.]
Most likely, the general experience of most consumers of dried prunes
would be that there would be the occasional pit, so it's not
considered a sufficient defect to be successfully actionable. There's
a case from Massachuetts involving a customer who swallowed a bone in
her fish chowde, and the court decided that a Bostonian would expect
the occasional bone.
That said, not all states use consumer expectation as the standard for
product liability, so I am surprised by the decision not to include
the disclaimer.
Daniel Reitman
FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. NO ATTORNEY CLIENT RELATIONSHIP
INTENDED.
mm
<jwisniaDu...@conversent.net> wrote:
>.
>
>The same goes for pitted olives I suppose, I've occasionally found a pit
>in one of them.
So has some senator in the US Senate cafeteria. He's suing the
Senate! (On the tv news within the last two weeks.)
>Jeff
--
If I don't say otherwise, the location is probably Maryland.
Posters should say what U,S. state if any they live in. Why
do so many keep their state as secret as their own name?
IANAL. That is, I am not a lawyer.