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4play See other 4play Articles Title: Inmate sues after biting into fingertip in jail (vegetarian) meal A Florida food packager that lists “convenience at your fingertips” as one of its top qualities has been sued by a California prison inmate who says that he bit into a real human fingertip when he consumed one of the company’s vegetarian meals. The company, G.A. Food Services, said in a letter to Pelican Bay State Prison that the ¾-inch fingertip accidentally had been sliced off the right middle finger of one of its workers when the employee was cleaning a filling machine on the frozen entree assembly line on July 14, 2004. The department manager mistakenly thought all flesh had been flushed from the machine, the letter said. When workers couldn’t find the fingertip, they assumed it had been washed down the drain. In the March 29 letter, included in the lawsuit, quality assurance director Frank Curto apologized for the “foreign object that was found in one of our frozen entrees” and “any inconveniences that were incurred as a result of this incident.” The apology apparently wasn’t good enough for Felipe Rocha, 29, of Los Angeles, incarcerated at the maximum security prison on drug charges. His lawyer, Sacramento-based Mark Merin, filed suit Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco. He is asking for at least $75,000 in damages from the St. Petersburg packager. In addition, Merin said, he wants the prison to stop buying food from G.A. Food Services because it is a nonunion shop in the right-to-work state of Florida, and he questions its sanitary standards. “Unlike the recently exposed fraud against Wendy’s, the fact of the chunk of human finger in plaintiff’s meal is indisputable, since Mr. Rocha is a prisoner … (and) the prepared meal was served to him in its original packaging in an isolation cell,” the lawsuit reads. That statement refers to a Las Vegas couple who were arrested after the woman allegedly planted a piece of human finger in a bowl of chili at a San Jose Wendy’s in March and claimed that she had found it there. “This man is in isolation, and he has all his own digits,” Merin said in an interview. Phone calls and an e-mail to G.A. Food Services were unreturned on Friday. The entree at issue was served on March 20 and supposed to be a “special vegetarian, soft diet meal,” for Rocha, who practices Buddhism in prison and has dental problems, Merin said. “That was what was unusual to him. As he was eating the cornbread, he chomped into something that appeared to be a cashew nut, tried to chew it, then took it out of his mouth,” Merin said. “Even though he’s in prison, he is not immune to the human feelings you experience when something like this happens,” Merin said. According to Curto’s letter, the company identified 99 cases of products that were in the same lot as the tainted meal, 17 of which were at Pelican Bay. Curto said all of the cases would be recalled and destroyed. According to its Web site http://(www.sunmeadow.net), G.A. Food Services was founded in 1973 and provides thousands of hot meals to elderly Floridians each day. Outside of Florida, the company markets its products to more than 40 states — including California — under the Sun Meadow brand. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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