Food Snark

By Amy Derby

As an agnostic vegetarian, I don’t get to many church potlucks. But if I went to one and became ill, you can be damn sure I wouldn’t be suing the church for serving up tainted meatballs. And — to be fair — neither did the folks who got sick from their supper.

Nope. It is the meat supplier, Nebraska Beef, responsible for delivering the contaminated goods, that is suing the church. Rather than owning up to the already genetically linked E. coli, which Bill Marler is suing over on behalf of the real victims in this case, Nebraska Beef is “contending in its own lawsuit that the volunteer church ladies who prepared the food were negligent,” per the New York Times.

From the article:

As for suing the church, Mr. Gordon [Nebraska Beef's lawyer] argued that the smorgasbord wasn’t a casual family dinner, but a money-making project for the church that was open to anyone willing to pay the freight.

“When you are running it as a money-making venture, why should you be any different from McDonald’s?” Mr. Gordon said. “Nobody is suing the old ladies, to use your term. In the same way that when McDonald’s gets sued, no one sues the nice teenage kid behind the counter.”

At least not yet.

Nebraska Beef’s E. coli-contaminated meat kills a 73-year-old woman and sickens at least 16 others, and yet it becomes arguable that the little old ladies who prepared the meal may be held legally responsible for the damage due to a chance that the tainted meat cross-contaminated other foods or because it’s possible that the meat wasn’t cooked well enough? How sad is our legal system, really?

Sounds a bit like ConAgra’s claim that hundreds of people sickened with salmonella should be held responsible for their own illnesses for not cooking the crap out of their potpies. While we’re at it, let’s go ahead and let the robber who broke into my house sue me for tripping over my floor lap; I mean, if I had been more careful in my cord placement he wouldn’t have broken that leg on his way in to shoot me, right? Dumbasses.