Airline sued for crunchy cake

By ANDREA MacDONALD
The Daily News


Airplane food gets a bad rap, all right, but this one takes the cake.

A Tantallon woman chowing down on her dessert aboard an Air Nova flight two years ago claims she found a rock in it.

Eleanor Humphries says she was travelling from Montreal to Halifax on May 11, 2000, when she discovered the foreign object in her food. She is suing the airline for a fractured tooth.

“The plaintiff used her fork to break off a bite-sized piece of cake and bit into a rock which was embedded in the cake,” Humphries’s lawsuit reads.

Her lawyer, Michael LeBlanc of Boyne Clarke, filed the documents Wednesday at Nova Scotia Supreme Court.

The suit names Air Canada Regional Inc., airline caterers Cara Operations Ltd. and cake-maker Gizella Pastry Ltd. as defendants.

The dessert was a piece of plain chocolate cake served in a plastic container.

Humphries claims the airline was negligent in failing to inspect the cake for harmful objects and ensuring its food is free from defects. Cara should have taken more care in packaging its desserts, she argues, and Gizella should have prepared its cakes in a clean workspace where no rocks could have fallen into the food.

http://www.canada.com/halifax/dailynews/story.asp?id={41DD4EC7-3927-4814-BFB4-0FB0771AC655}

More work for the scanners?
I envision a sticker:
This cake has been X-rayed and does not contain any harmful objects.

On second thoughts, they do not have to label if they use genetically altered ingredients.

hank@ster

Well, it's a good thing she wasn't on an international flight. If so, her ability to sue for damages would have been limited by the Bad and Rancid Food On the High Seas Act (BARFOSA) which limits the liability of the carrier to the replacement value of the food. Had she choked on the rock and died, her survivors would have been entitled to one piece of (rock-free) bad airline cake or the cash equivalent thereof (about seven cents). A government spokesman explains that the act (BARFOSA) raises the bar for food-related compensation, which would otherwise fall under the Warsaw Wienerschnitzel Treaty, which does not specify that the compensatory cake must be rock-free.