It’s relatively common for a newspaper to be ordered to pay damages as a result of an injurious piece of reporting. It’s rare, however, for the nature of the injuries to be physical.
In Chile, 13 people sued a newspaper after they suffered burns due to a faulty recipe. The case made it all the way to the country’s supreme court, which AP reports awarded $125,000 to the victims in an announcement Monday.
From the story:
Judges determined that the newspaper failed to fully test it before publication, and that if readers followed the recipe exactly, the churros had a good chance of exploding once the oil reached the suggested temperature.
I’ve seen many recipe errors over the years, but it’s not often you see people actually suffer injuries as a result of one.
A somewhat similar incident occurred in 2008, when a famous chef apologized after he offered potentially fatal food advice in Healthy and Organic Living magazine. Via a report in the Guardian:
The celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson today apologised after mistakenly recommending a potentially fatal weed as part of a healthy living regime.
In an interview in the latest issue of Healthy and Organic Living magazine, the TV cook suggested that the weed, called henbane, would make a tasty addition to salads.