Local Man Sues McDonald's Over "Defective" Chicken McNugget

By Jim Bochnowski in News on May 19, 2015 9:20PM

Photo: McDonald's

In May of 2013, Cook County resident Zebadiah Anderson, went to McDonald's to eat a delicious Chicken McNugget at Water Tower Place. He chowed down into a "defective" nugget, full of spiky bone shards and was quickly rushed off to the hospital.

On Monday he filed a lawsuit, alleging that "the Subject Chicken McNugget" was too sharp to eat safely and left him with "severe" injuries.

It "constituted an unreasonably dangerous product when put to use for which it was intended," according to the suit, "in that it could not be consumed with safety and without the risk of impaling and/or cutting the consumer in the mouth, tongue and/or throat, and potentially causing additional damage to the stomach, digestive track and intestines of the consumer, due to the sharp bone shards contained therein."

The lawsuit also alleges that the employees were derelict in their duties by not inspecting the nuggets for bone shards. However, that seems beyond the purview of the McDonald's employees, as the processing of the meat occurs off site. As an investigation in the American Journal of Medicine found, most chicken nuggets are only about 50 percent what we'd consider meat. The rest consists of fat, blood vessels, nerve, connective tissue, and ground bone—but allegedly not ground enough.

The food conglomerate is already having a tough week, with the company selling off $4.3 billion in debt Monday. According to Crain's, McDonald's has been struggling to reverse a trend of sagging sales and poorly-performing shares.

McDonald's has also caught some flack for a bizarre "rebranding" of the Hamburglar, which turned the once beloved cartoon character into some kind of hipster gentleman criminal.