It’s an odd offshoot of the “Oprah”-like cases, where Oprah was sued over allegedly disparaging remarks about beef (“trade libel; product disparagement; product libel; trade disparagement). It’s the kind of twist only a lawyer could love.

The claim was that they were saying:

1) There was no evidence that green onions were the cuprit.

2) They were changing green onion suppliers just in case.

I stand by my claim that you cannot say those two things coherently unless you also say that green onions were chosen randomly (as you suggest).

The problem is that Taco Bell did not say that green onions were chosen randomly and nobody would have gotten that impression from their announcement.

The problem is their claim that the green onions were the only food that did not test negative. It takes quite a bit of analysis to understand that this doesn’t mean the green onions were the culprit. A naive reading of that statement suggests that it is almost certain they are.

In fact what happened was the preliminary test on the green onions was unable to exclude them (the test did not come back positive or negative, but unable to exclude) and the sample of lettuce that was tested (lettuce was ultimately shown to be the culprit) just happened to be negative.

The only justification for changing green onion suppliers with such weak evidence is the ability to assure the public you have done something.

Which, of course, probably had enormous business value in this case. I’m not saying that’s not a sufficient justification. I am saying the behavior is only rational because the public needed something to be done even when there was nothing to be done.

Really? You mean, if you know that SOME part of the food you are serving is causing problems, but you have no idea which part it is, you might not just change suppliers just to see if MAYBE that’s it? People do things like that all the time!

In fact, process of elimination is a great way to determine what IS causing the problem (especially if other methods have failed) – change providers, see if the problem goes away. If not, change providers of another ingredient, see if the problem goes away. etc. When the problem goes away, there’s a good chance that the problem was with the product of which you most recently changed suppliers.

None of those changes state ANYTHING about any of the provicers involved, except that one of them was causing the problem… which was already a known fact. WHICH one? None of those changes state one in particular.

In fact, by changing providers, if the problem doesn’t go away, you have just (for all practical purposes) proven that the supplier in question was NOT the problem! If that’s “slander”, well, we’ve got a problem in our slander laws.

If there’s an off-change that there might be a problem with the supplier, sufficient to justify changing suppliers, then perhaps other people who are also cautious should change suppliers too.

However, I don’t see how there’s a defamation case. I don’t see how a series of factually true statements can constitute defamation or libel. The fact is, Boskovich is the victim of an unfortunate series of events, not the intentional or reckless actions of Taco Bell.

Legitimate business concerns justified what might seem like an over-reaction. You can’t say, “well, yeah, people are dying from our food, but we’ll wait until we know for sure why before we do anything.” You have to assure people you are doing everything possible to fix the problem, even things that don’t seem justified.

If that can be spun as defamation…. well, that’s the system we’ve got, isn’t it? Excuse me whil I puke.