From Lowering the Bar comes the heartwarming story of a woman who sued General Mills (well, actually, she sued General Mills’ parent company, PepsiCo) because she thought Crunchberries were real:
On May 21, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California dismissed a complaint filed by a woman who said she had purchased “Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries” because she believed “crunchberries” were real fruit. The plaintiff, Janine Sugawara, alleged that she had only recently learned to her dismay that said “berries” were in fact simply brightly-colored cereal balls, and that although the product did contain some strawberry fruit concentrate, it was not otherwise redeemed by fruit. She sued, on behalf of herself and all similarly situated consumers who also apparently believed that there are fields somewhere in our land thronged by crunchberry bushes.
The judge, of course, threw the suit out, with one of the more entertaining legal opinions of the few I’ve ever read:
In this case . . . while the challenged packaging contains the word “berries” it does so only in conjunction with the descriptive term “crunch.” This Court is not aware of, nor has Plaintiff alleged the existence of, any actual fruit referred to as a “crunchberry.” Furthermore, the “Crunchberries” depicted on the [box] are round, crunchy, brightly-colored cereal balls, and the [box] clearly states both that the Product contains “sweetened corn & oat cereal” and that the cereal is “enlarged to show texture.” Thus, a reasonable consumer would not be deceived into believing that the Product in the instant case contained a fruit that does not exist. . . . So far as this Court has been made aware, there is no such fruit growing in the wild or occurring naturally in any part of the world.
The Court does, in an act of tremendous intellectual responsibility, leave open the possibility that somewhere in the world there could be fields of artificially-grown Crunchberry bushes. This is an intriguing possibility; perhaps these Crunchberries were engineered through a creative hybridization process involving blackberries, popcorn, and what we can only assume is high-grade industrial waste. Nevertheless, if these artificial abominations against the Lord do exist on some island of Dr. Frankenberry in the middle of the Pacific, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California has wisely not pronounced that they don’t exist – only that, as we could all see anyway, they aren’t anything natural.
Next week’s case is a civil suit filed against the makers of Alpha-Bits, for not including umlauts, accented letters, or non-Latin characters like ð or Þ in the cereal. “My son Friðþjófur couldn’t write his name in his Alpha-bits and was traumatized for life!”
Tags: Breakfast Cereal, Crunchberries, Friðþjófur, General Mills, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California