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It’s a question the people have been asking for many years.
Sure, plenty of people love a breaded, fried, and sauced piece of chicken, especially when served with bleu cheese or ranch and perhaps even celery and carrots. But are boneless wings truly worthy of being called wings?
After all, they’re not actually from the wing of the chicken, and many would argue that they’re nothing but a sauced-up chicken nugget. Although real ones know that is not the case, since nuggets are filled with a mixture, coincidentally, known as a farce, while boneless wings are normally just a cut of chicken.
However, now a United States District Court in the state of Illinois has given us official clarification on this often controversial debate.
Judge Rules That ‘Boneless Wings’ Are, In Fact, Considered Wings
In the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division, Plaintiff Aimen Halim had a literal bone to pick.
Halim claimed that the defendant, chicken wing chain Buffalo Wild Wings, is falsely advertising when it sells its “boneless wings,” and that he was led to believe the items were real chicken wings with the bones removed.
He argued that the product should be called something different, something like “chicken poppers.”
District Judge John Tharp Jr. made a ruling in Mr. Halim’s case on Tuesday, and it’s one that may disappoint wing lovers everywhere.
“Halim sued BWW over his confusion, but his complaint has no meat on its bones,” Tharp Jr. wrote in his opinion. “Halim does not plausibly allege that reasonable consumers are deceived by boneless wings, so he has failed to state a plausible claim for relief.”
Tharp Jr. questioned what Halim believed a truly boneless wing would look like or how it would be made, and noted that he did not claim that the boneless wings were deceptive in appearance.
Halim also sought to bring a nationwide class action suit on behalf of others who were allegedly tricked into buying
boneless wings, thinking that they were actually de-boned chicken wings. That suit will no longer move forward.
So there we have it. Like it or not, “boneless wings,” at least in the advertising world, are wings. The courts have ruled, and the precedent has been set. There’s no going back now.